You already have the cone to decide when it starts. The only thing it would enable is to free aim. It seems legit for me that a reaction shot aims to center mass. But I would give them a lower accuracy by default. You could make it better with a perk. An other perk to make 2 shots…
Noooooooooooooooo
I imagine it being able to try to ambush you when there are not many of them left on the map instead of running into your fire like an idiot. Constant attack mode of AI is what makes nests a boring slog as rolling overwatch is the simplest tactics that just works. So imagine a chess where you play with your dog that always takes the same moves. Might be amusing but not interesting in long run.
Initiative roll in BB is a nice mechanics on top of the whole plaster of who takes the next turn, it is necessary in the game as otherwise your turn order would be very stale and don’t change much from battle to battle. It’s solving a different issue as you don’t have a free choice of which of your units takes next turn.
It applies to both sides, rushing into a building without having any idea of what is there is just a mistake. It makes for a slower paced gameplay, something that this game clearly needs.
This is just absurd and you know it. Interrupts are neither guaranteed nor is the core tactics in the fight mechanics. They just give a bit of extra potential edge to the defensive side + they can dumped the “loss of TU” if you didn’t taken an action or moved as there was no good reason to do so. Along with feature like X-Com’s reaction fire, they clearly show you that it’s not wise to always use all of your TU on every turn. This half typical distance that soldier moves in a round and makes a decision to “Rush” more risky. You see, it adds ability to “Rush” without any sort of extra button that costs something, it’s always there and wrong use of it is penalized by the general game mechanics instead of a single resource.
Overwatch has many problems, you don’t have to experiment with it as all the issues are clearly shown in XCom:
In PP you can:
and you have no control over it besides on which exact piece of map it will be activatedIf you have Interrupts, you don’t need neither Overwatch nor Reaction Fire, its all covered by the same mechanics and you have full control over what your soldier does if interrupt happens.
As long as they are predefined interrupts, it’s ok for me.
Either move or shoot, not both.
Why? (obligatory characters)
We’re going back to the part where nobody would move and wait for the other to get out of cover first.
He gets out of cover, you have your 4AP to spend into moving - shooting - moving back.
An action on the enemy turn should have a limited number of AP, it can become an unfair advantage. Let’s say 2AP max and that forces the sniper to pick the first ability to do some over-watching.
You can get interrupted in the same way during your interrupt. You are not using any extra AP, you can use only what you haven’t spent already. You are not guaranteed to get interrupt. You are free to choose how AP should be spent. This eliminates a need for a number of discrete abilities.
This is not some new untested thing, check here for how people changed basic JA2 interrupt into something even better:
http://thepit.ja-galaxy-forum.com/index.php?t=msg&th=18946&prevloaded=1&&start=0
^people already did a lot of hard work on this subject 10 years ago. There are plenty of discussion of pros and cons on this, this is not some ephimerial subject. Even the basic system solves more problems that it can potentially introduce.
What do you do right now if you don’t want to Return Fire? Like for example if one of your units got mind controlled - you can’t do nothing about this, besides moving your RF guys into such position where they can’t see him. Does this sound like a meaningful gameplay? You are working around some meta game rules.
What do you do with AP that you don’t have a good use for? Set overwatch in some general direction and waste bullets on shooting wall. Set overwatch that is visible by AI and now he will try to pass around it. Move to some points cause it looks better. Do nothing and waste points. Interrupts just extend what you can do with AP in a useful way and don’t telegraph your intention to enemy as overwatch does. Yet they are not guaranteed to trigger.
Just want to add something else that is pretty neat of how it works. One of the core stats used for Interrupts in JA2 is experience level of the soldier. What this means as the result is that your most experienced and probably most valued merc has the highest chance to do a successful breach or counter attack. So you are taking a larger risk but you get a better payout. A low experience merc, which is cheaper can be used too but more as a cannon fodder. So you can make a choice if you are going to trigger enemy interrupt using a cheaper guy who will probably die or use a more valuable merc but he will have a higher chance to re-interrupt interrupt of the enemy and no-one on your team gets injured.
lol - well I’m just saying, that’s how you prevent every one sitting back on interrupts. But now you mention it… 
Chaos Reborn was based around having a turn count. The game was finely balanced overall between offensive and defensive play, but certainly as you got into the later turns of the game, no matter what you natural inclination that turn count would force you to go for it and take risks that you probably wouldn’t do otherwise.
@BoredEngineer there is one thing I don’t understand, you keep saying the interrupt is not guaranteed. What would make it so in PP?
Stats of soldier, action of enemy, amount of AP spend by enemy while he is observed by your troops. It’s chance based, and chance goes higher if more AP is spend, experience level of soldier is high, distance to enemy is low.
So it’s basically a bunch of numbers put together and a die roll - the simulation approach of JA2 1.13.
I wonder: have you noticed that a core design principle of PP is that there is no chance at all except in the ballistics simulation? Take any mechanic in the game, from stealth to RF to panic. There is not a single die roll, whereas in the simulation approach of JA2 1.13 there is not one game mechanic without some die roll. Why do you insist on advocating grafts to PP from 1.13, when they follow opposite approaches?
JA2 Vanilla was already firmly in the “attempt at simulation” camp, with most players actually not understanding much about all the underlying rules and playing mostly by feel. The mechanics of 1.13 are completely impenetrable to anyone but an enthusiast. I really encourage anybody who reads about these wonderful mechanics from Ja2 1.13 to visit their forums to see it for themselves - they are like excerpts from a tech manual for a death ray.
An ordinary player doesn’t really know at all what is going on in 1.13 - he tries playing it the way he did JA2, and either gives up because things feel off, or invests time in trial and error to adjust his gaming style, still not understanding what’s under the hood.
So of course Snapshot is never going to go along with this because it goes against the design philosophy of their game. I don’t need to be a mindreader to tell you that these devs are not willing to choose the expedient “let’s put a bunch of different numbers together, give them different weight, and add a die roll”. Yeah, every problem solved.
It’s piety that you have a such a simplistic view of the both games. Reductionist approach is good for deconstructing problems but not for understanding media. First of all, I’m not advocating to copy a mechanic, that would be just dumb. I’m proposing to replace a “pre-choice abilities” that don’t function well with giving player the exactly same tools as he uses during his turn to enact during enemy turn. You don’t have to use any dice roll to do that, you can have a clean set of rules. As in at level 7 if more than 2 AP are available, you get interrupt at distance not more than 10 squares if enemy has 2 AP or less. At level 6 this distance is lowered by one or two squares. You can even have a passive ability that extends the range of interrupt. Done. No dice rolls. If that is the problem at all.
It doesn’t matter what happens on the background if game is capable of hiding all complexity. You don’t have to have a PhD in game development to play 1.13. the large portion of confusion comes from, as you said yourself, a precognition based on the experience with vanilla, so the least time you’ve spent on vanilla the less issue you are going to have. 1.13 is technically a mod, not a base game, of course some of it’s mechanics are more complex and require external reading to understand and use. How is that a news when it comes to overhaul mods? But then again, there is a ton of changes that don’t have any level of complicated discussions because they are obvious to player from UI, like new inventory system. The base game has like 50+ basic systems and most of the “I’m confused” discussion are revolving around - New Chance To Hit, 100 base time units, Interrupts and new Action system which just didn’t exist before an has a primitive UI. These are small fraction of the systems used and improved in the game.
How something works in a game A is irrelevant to a game B, unless all of the connected mechanics are copied. It’s pathetic to point out some irrelevant flaws in a different product when you can’t argue anymore about subject in place.
Are you Snapshot dev? If not then don’t take a role of talking on behalf of one. The discussion of why you personally don’t like something are not interesting to anyone but yourself. We can talk about this without bringing up our personal feelings based on some personal experiences with products.
The question is simple, would you prefer to choose yourself what character should do, or rely on some pre-selected action outcome of which is not guaranteed to be optimal?
Imagine if you would randomly land at some spot when you use jetpack? That would be pretty annoying, the same way it’s annoying of how randomly both RF and Overwatch work. They are multi step actions of the same actions that can be done by player, why “automate” them in the first place?
… Then you go to the chess problem already explained, because it means predictably altering the order of turns in a turn based game…
It’s not my intention to offend you, and I sincerely apologize if I have. I think ja2 is a great game, and 1.13 is a great mod, - there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the simulation approach.
But I feel very frustrated because you keep saying “why not do away with such and such stupid mechanic from PP and replace it with something like this, say from 1.13”, when it is a remarkable achievement to make TTB combat of this complexity using die rolls only for ballistics.
You often write on this forum that the skills in PP are magic, that it turns PP into some sort of dumb-downed influenced-by-xcom2 fantasy tactics game, and then quote games that have dice everywhere as examples of better game design. However, the real magic in TTB game design are dice, because it’s an easy fix for everything. A skill can be OP? Just add a dice roll so it outputs on a range. You want to add some decision making process where there is no decision to be made because an optimal solution exists? Throw in some more dice.
Yes, all this smudging can add a veneer of realism because chance is an important part of our reality. However, there is a price. Chess would be more “realistic” with weighted stats and die rolls, but you could no longer rely on complex combinations to work. The same applies to PP. For example, in PP a player can make extremely complex and satisfying combinations because there are no die rolls except for simulating ballistics (issues of some OP skills and balance aside - I agree they have to be fixed): throw in some dice for “realism” and you can throw that out of the window too.
Please, please try to appreciate PP for what it is, instead of assuming that at some point in the development process the devs were seduced by the dark side, preventing them from making the perfect “realistic” and “proper” turn based tactics game.
What is wrong with that? If you are not spending APs and letting enemy to do the first move you anyway loose initiative. For example, he can take a shot before you can interrupt. Or he can move at a position which is more defensive than he was at before.
As there are multiple facets to this, want to address them separately.
RNG/Dice rolls - building a game around the idea of not using some particular solution to the issues of some mechanics is a bit weird approach. I mean, its not more than fascinating if someone tries to make a house without any sharp angles. Yes that can look cool but that satisfies only one of requirements of what clients are looking at when searching for a house. The same is with games. Like the devs of Phantom Doctrine seams to be bend on idea of not having rng in their various games. That’s fine, but does this lead to a better game play? Does such pursuit places resources and effort in a place most needed in their games? Not sure, simply because two of their games that I’ve played had a really weird feeling of playing like a card game while presenting everything on 3d grid. Like will this position protect me from a headshot or not - that doesn’t matter, what matters is if enemy has more some points than you… why do you even need a 3d map then? You could do the same gameplay as 2d overlay and don’t confuse people who are expecting more of a tactical combat game where placement and movement are important. Instead, the movement is the most boring part of the game as it has little relevance to combat mechanics.
Dice rolls a way more than just an rng. What they do is change a function of fail/win. Let me demonstrate:
Let’s say you have a game where you fly airplane in a canyon and there are some AA guns that shoot at you. In an arcade game, they just lob a projectile in your direction and if your airplane is at the same spot with projectile you get -hp or loose life, simple arcade stuff. How do we make such games more interesting - we add more content, we have tons of enemies lobbing stuff at you and you try to dodge it all while killing them. Simple, requires reflexes and fast decision making more than thinking.
Now we do a different rule-set, AA gun lobs a projectile that takes time to reach airplane, using distance and speed of airplane, it calculates the point where lobbed projectile will cross airplane path, taking into account speed of the projectile (pretty much how ww2 aa artillery worked). If you don’t add any error into measurement of speed and distance then such AA gun will be incredibly accurate and won’t give you much chance to dodge a shot. So instead of observing shrapnel exploding closer and closer to airplane, giving a clear indication that player has to do something, he just gets blown up. Which is no different to an arcade game, so why bother? But if you add a bit of error into calculations (rng), now the player can observe and study the effectiveness of AA fire. He can understand at which distance/speed/frequency of direction change he can stay relatively safe from AA. Just here we added depth into gameplay and removed a binary fail/win condition. Whatever it’s better or worse than in example above depends on which game is being made. If you don’t want your rules to be discrete, that’s what you will have to do. Or find some other way to make your fail/win function more than a binary.
Now let’s look at third example. AA gun has ability of shooting down airplanes with red wings as soon as it gets into the range. But player can switch color of the wings… Ok. We don’t have any rng here, we just have rules. But these rules have no connection to neither airplane nor AA gun. Why do we control airplane then? I don’t know it’s just a “dressing”. It’s just an abstract game, like chess. But then why do we fly a detailed model of A-10? Because it looks cool. So it’s not about airplanes? No it’s about choosing right combination of colors and managing resources… Do you see where this is going?
If you want to sell me an abstract game but with guns, then call it “Like chess but with guns” and you will avoid misleading all the people who don’t care about games based on abstract rule sets. These types of games are like games made for someone who wants to be a lawyer clerck - you need to memorize an arbitrary set of rules and know when to use them. They for sure can be fun, but that is a different story.
Which gets us to “magical abilities” in PP. What are they? Well they are just those abstract rules from above. They have little connection to the setting and to the lore of the world. They are just there. They allow you to spend resources to gain resources. What are those resources? Well they are abstract numbers again, one is a willpower and action points and another is mission score. Can this work well? Of course it can but in this case you can design 90% of your game on paper and have a solid foundation that just needs a visual dressing.
PP changed radically since early builds. I can only speculate but comparing two I’m almost sure that different people worked on them or had different design goal. The early builds where way less abstract than Firaxis XCom, which convinced me to support this project monetarily an vocally. The release version, is way more abstract than Firaxis XCom and I can’t call it a good thing as later was always jarring to me as how much weird abstract and meta rules is there.
I mean what kind of appreciation do you expect from me? I’ve payed a premium price and recommended this game to many people. But right now I don’t even understand what this game is suppose to be. I can’t tell if the devs are going for a chess like gameplay or not. Are they just copy/pasting features from Firaxis to be more approachable or they are really going for a different experience. IMHO it feels like a prototype in a pre-production stage but with a lot of content. Like core mechanics are still being worked on and it’s not clear at whom the end product is targeted.
Like you clearly want it to be Chess with Guns, I clearly want it to be a tactical shooty bang bang “sim”. So how come we have this discussion about the game that is already released?
I want to address this separately because I don’t think this is true. The whole complex and satisfying combinations are applicable only when your get your soldiers to some minimal level. At the beginning of the game it play very differently. It plays closer to a methodical tactics game, closer to how game was at early builds. Then gameplay radically changes. So early game is hardly interesting for chess players and later is not interesting for people who don’t like abstract rules. Which is again, an indicator that games doesn’t know what it wants to be.
If you don’t believe me, check this recording from BB1:
Look at how gameplay revolves around maneuvers and taking pot shots. How large is the distance of firefights. This is where Return Fire ability made so much sense as it was nowhere a guarantee for your soldier to die if he is taking a high cover. Does this look like a game that needs a Dash or a game that needs smoke grenades? So you can cover and maneuver in multiple turns instead run into the face and shotgun.
Sounds to me like the two of you want completely different games. Ultimately I - and I suspect a lot of people on these forums - don’t care. We just want a game that works, and one that does what we signed on for.
I like the fact that the targeting system is ballistically based, but that a slight movement by the target might enable a shot to slip through the tiniest of cracks, making a 100% shot miss - because there are no 100% certain hits in ‘real’ life. But I love the fact that this isn’t governed by a percentage dice roll - albeit that the trajectory of each shot is governed by some RNG.
I like the fact that you can combine skills in an open sandbox and come up with some weird and wonderful combinations that do cool things; but I hate that this is currently so open that it can utterly ruin the game. So there have to be limitations, otherwise the game breaks.
Similarly, I like that the Pandas adjust to how well you do, but I severely dislike the way it’s currently done, which feels way to arbitrary and has no relation to what tactics you are using.
In a similar vein, I liked the way that the old RF made you think tactically and not charge out into the open to take a pot-shot at the nearest enemy if his buddies were around and covering him. That felt right - it was overpowered, but that just needed tweaking. The new system sucks, because it lends itself to more super-alpha play, where you simply ignore the tactical situation, run up to the nearest Crabbie and stick your shotgun in its face.
So, to get to the point of your argument, I like the idea of APs hanging over and being used defensively to prevent Alpha-strikes - I am going to call this APR for ‘AP Reaction’ from now on. I don’t see how an RNG will help this though - surely the simple calculation is ‘if X has enough AP to do R (ie. fire a shot), then X does R’. I also worry that 2 (in fact 3) things will happen:
So frankly, I just want the devs to fix RF as it stands - make it reactive within 10 tiles by all the buddies of the target being shot at; they get to fire one shot and one shot only, after the shooter has ducked back into any cover he’s just fired from behind; and the target doesn’t get a RF. That means it punishes idiots who run out into the open and blast away at things when there 5 guys with MGs covereing the area, but doesn’t auto-kill you when you fail to kill a Crabbie doing a 6x50 MG burst.
If contact can be initiated without activating interrupt, interrupt should never happen unless the player makes a mistake. If contact cannot happen without interrupt occurring, no contact should ever take place without one of the player’s making a mistake.
The problem of a mechanic that predictably switches turns in a turn based game is that to switch turns with your opponent is always the optimal solution. That’s why you would need the die, to add an element of uncertainty.
About your arguments on RNG in game design. I don’t think it’s necessary to repeat that I’m not against rng per se, etc.
I apologize, I really don’t want to argue about this at the moment any more. Maybe at another time.
Agree on that and I think it’s an excellent feature but currently its not very relevant in so many cases because of how small is the distance of firefight. The accuracy is just too good. I don’t remember a single instance where I would use Quick Aim on sniper rifle to get a more precise shot, I use it to take two shots per turn.
Which is an excellent idea. If you check my old posts, I’m not against abilities and being able to layer them. I’m against specifically magical abilities which. There where so many suggestions already to this, like limiting RB to automatic weapons only, having Dash use some AP and etc. Quick Aim allowing to take more shots with less precision. I’m not criticizing devs for going with idea of having abilities, it’s specific to types of abstract abilities.
I find the idea behind old RF to be clever: You have two types of cover, but one is not absolutely superior to other. Each has it’s downside. RF just makes it work, because the best full cover requires to get into open and have higher chance to catch RF. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well with the shortened distances of firefight and high precision. Regardless of which way you do it - the old way where everyone shoots or new way where only target shoots, it’s just too dangerous unless it’s nerfed and then its still dangerous if you have enough enemies or outright annoying when you have to wait for 20+ crabs to play their animation. If we forget about how RF works or worked and look more into why it is needed? It is needed as “anti-mehcanics” against choosing full cover as the most optimal solution. So what is needed at the end is ability of enemy to take a shot at you when you get out of full cover to take a shot. Do you agree? IMHO interrupts can do that. Or of course more balanced version of RF can do that too. It’s just interrupts can help with other things.
Completely agree, I’m thinking about it as more of a long term fix, not a shortcut. Maybe for the next game.
Agree but you have to make a choice between annoyance of few and long term benefits. Like desire to have more smooth experience can lead to issues. Good example is idle animations. I understand that without them, crabs will be standing like frozen and it’s not too exciting but right now you can abuse this if you are aware of it. Later when most of the players are aware of it, you will have many people just sitting and waiting for a good keyframe of animation to make an attack. To me this sounds very meta like and overall awful as such waiting game will add to the boredom.
I don’t think that would be case because interrupts requires APs and RF doesn’t. Chances to get interrupt from multiple opponents is therefore less than getting RF from multiple opponents.
In this case it will lose it’s primary purpose - balance between full and half cover. But maybe it would be better overall I don’t know.