BB3 Some thoughts on Return Fire

[VOLAND]

Can you read my good man?

@VOLAND

I like RNG, I really do. But I also think that it is the easier game design option. It’s easier to make a “roulette game” than a “chess game”. And sometimes I want to play a game where I have no idea what is going on under the hood except that it involves plenty of dice and I’m playing “by feel”, and sometimes a game where there is plenty of dice and I can almost see them, and sometimes I want to play a game where RNG is very confined.
All have their merits.

And this is it, from now on I’m ignoring you.

[MichaelIgnotus]

@BoredEngineer

But now yes, the efficient cover is the one where you completely remove any LOS, which only adds micro-management.

Horses for courses. For you it adds to micro-management, for me it adds to realism, as that’s the way I see soldiers in real-war videos using cover. Let’s agree to disagree and move on.

[BoredEngineer]

@VOLAND

Can you read my good man?

Yes I can:

@VOLAND

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.

@VOLAND

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.

@VOLAND

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.

@VOLAND

I like RNG, I really do. But I also think that it is the easier game design option. It’s easier to make a “roulette game” than a “chess game”. And sometimes I want to play a game where I have no idea what is going on under the hood except that it involves plenty of dice and I’m playing “by feel”, and sometimes a game where there is plenty of dice and I can almost see them, and sometimes I want to play a game where RNG is very confined.
All have their merits. As an example of a very fun game where RNG is so confined it’s practically absent, take Dune the boardgame. Which has been recently being re-edited for the first time in I don’t know how many decades.

Isn’t it pretty clear that while you claim to be fine with all kinds of games you keep using negative or diminutive terms in regards to simulations and rng while uplifting everything deterministic such as Chess. Even the Dune got a praised because “RNG is so confined it’s practically absent”.
And that’s my point, you like deterministic games more, it’s fine. You thought that PP is like that or will be like that. That is fine too. I prefer sims, as so far these are the only games that provided my with enough depth of gameplay. I don’t consider games like Chess to be a “deep”, as certain core principals behind them, like determinism puts a hard limit on creativity of design. Those limits can lead to creation of all kind of abstract balancing rules, which are there for the sake of fixing self inflicted issues. I just don’t want this game to be another variation of Firaxis XCom that is full of such solutions. We already have such game and a new one is in the works. Ideological approach that denies usage of some features solely on grounds of them belonging to a different class of functions is a bit extreme. Why care about how function works as long as it provides output that is better? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sim where absolutely everything was done using non-determenistic rules just for the sake of it, this sounds really silly from the designer point of view.

[BoredEngineer]

@MichaelIgnotus

Horses for courses. For you it adds to micro-management, for me it adds to realism, as that’s the way I see soldiers in real-war videos using cover. Let’s agree to disagree and move on.

It was a side not to point out that regular cover is ineffective, but thank you for confirming the same though own actions in the game.

[SpiteAndMalice]

@MichaelIgnotus

Most complaints on this forum come from XCOM (and I assume other system) players who assume that if they are hiding behind a rock that has a fully filled in shield icon, they are somehow completely covered from fire.

The issue isn’t the cover, it’s the full shield icon that indicates that that cover is providing you with 100% protection. If the shield wasn’t shown, players would be more inclined to make their own judgement call IMHO.

That, and you don’t have the option to manually change your stance when behind that cover to make best effective use of it.

[MichaelIgnotus]

You’re welcome. Cover’s not completely ineffective, otherwise we wouldn’t hug it as closely as we do, but it doesn’t work the way people assume it does. To me that’s not a problem. Once you’ve figured out how it does work, you can use it pretty effectively to your advantage.

I see a lot of people complaining on these fora that Crabbie/Trirons have perfect aim. Not in my experience they don’t, but you have to use the cover system properly to make that work.

[MichaelIgnotus]

Agreed. The confusion is based on our conditioning from other games. So they should change the icon to something that can’t be misinterpreted, not change the cover system.

PP is very much its own beast, and (balancing issues aside) all the better for that imho.

[BoredEngineer]

@MichaelIgnotus

You’re welcome. Cover’s not completely ineffective, otherwise we wouldn’t hug it as closely as we do, but it doesn’t work the way people assume it does. To me that’s not a problem. Once you’ve figured out how it does work, you can use it pretty effectively to your advantage

Funny that you’ve mentioned it because hugging the cover is what this game actually needs. A literal lean to the cover to create the smallest side profile. If game wants to keep going with the amount of movement both sides can do and having limited view range.

If you mean removing LOS as a proper use of cover, then you don’t need any icons indicating the cover in the first place. What is now a half cover can be a complete no-LOS cover too if soldier can “hunker down” behind it. I mean, in a game where you have flexible amount of AP it makes sense to just move your soldier one tile to a side, take a shot and then move back. XCom needed those cover points as you couldn’t do such side steps. Some people do manual side stepping already because of the bugs with some particular tiles which are not recognized as cover from which you can side-step but they look like it. Some, like you I assume, side-step to maximize cover. The game could just embrace this concept and remove “false” cover indicator that it has right now.

[SpiteAndMalice]

It’s probably buried here, so I made a separate thread regarding shield icons being misleading.

Remove the shield icons from cover

For anyone that has previously played TBS games, the full and half cover icons for cover give a false impression that they will provide 50% and 100% respectively cover to any solider hiding behind that cover. This is not the case in PP, to which it might be better to remove those icons from cover entirely, and let the player determine for themselves how effective cover might be.

[SpiteAndMalice]

@MichaelIgnotus

Auick Aim has never increased accuracy in the entire history of the BBs. It has always just been a way of using 2 or 3 WP to reduce the cost of a Sniper Rifle down to 2 APs and the cost of smaller weapons down to 1 or 0 APs.
The name just means you get to aim quickly enough to get more than 1 shot off in a turn. Once you’ve triggered it, you simply play out those shots the way you would normally and as far as I can tell it doesn’t (and never has) affect(ed) the targeting reticle.

This is the game text:

Whether it changes the target reticle or not I don’t know, it might just move a higher proportion of shots into the inner circle.

I’ve always felt that it’s the wrong way round, a quick aim that reduces AP for shots is good, but I feel that that should come with a penalty to aim, not a boost to it.

[MichaelIgnotus]

I stand corrected, though in my empirical experience, it doesn’t appear to affect the target reticle (but that’s probably just me).

I agree: taking 2 snap shots shouldn’t magically increase your accuracy - though I think the WP cost of using a skill to do this should mean your accuracy isn’t decreased either.

[MichaelIgnotus]

@BoredEngineer

If you mean removing LOS as a proper use of cover, then you don’t need any icons indicating the cover in the first place.

You know what, I wouldn’t be averse to that - though it might freak out new players.
There are also a number of cosmetic icons on the map that provide no cover whatsoever, which confuse the issue. Still, learning by trial & error which bits of the map provide protection and which don’t might actually reduce cover frustration rather than increase it.

[VOLAND]

@BoredEngineer

Isn’t it pretty clear that while you claim to be fine with all kinds of games you keep using negative or diminutive terms in regards to simulations and rng while uplifting everything deterministic such as Chess.

I’m saying that each approach has its merits. Yes, it is harder to make a chess game that works. It doesn’t mean that I consider chess the pinacle of gaming. I’m using it as the example of a game where there is no RNG at all.

I praised Dune in reference to this comment:

@SpiteAndMalice

It’s true that some people don’t understand or don’t like to work with probabilities, but speaking as someone who does enjoy RNG the probability based maths involved in a game that utilises RNG mechanics is far more engaging and re-playable than a game that doesn’t.

What I meant is that a game with very confined RNG can also be very fun and engaging.

And as to PP what I’m saying is that it’s a game with confined RNG (at least once combat starts). It was clearly a design choice to make it so, because dice smudging (and this is not a negative term, it’s precisely what you describe in like 3 pages about the WW2 planes) though providing an easy solution to difficult problems (think, for example, how stealth OP would disappear with a pair of dice) and realism, has a cost or disadvantage to game with confined RNG.

If you read each of my posts you will see that this is what I have been saying all along. I don’t want PP to be a chess game, that’s absurd. I acknowledge the intent of the devs to limit the use of RNG in their game design and I embrace it. If it was the other way around and they decided to do something like JA2 - spreadsheets of weighted stats and dice, so that it would be played by feel, I would embrace that too and would say no, I’m sorry, it doesn’t make sense to add, say, a deterministic mechanic for stealth/detection to a sim game.

I know that you want PP to be a simulation, which has to involve profuse use of RNG (because reality is like that), but the game clearly followed a different path and I wish that you could appreciate that it does have its advantages.

[SpiteAndMalice]

@VOLAND

it’s precisely what you describe in like 3 pages about the WW2 planes

I think you might be mixing up who you’re replying to there, or I’m getting memory loss.

[VOLAND]

@SpiteAndMalice

it’s precisely what you describe in like 3 pages about the WW2 planes

I think you might be mixing up who you’re replying to there, or I’m getting memory loss.

I was replying to BoredEngineer, but I quoted you in my response to explain my previous post. We will have to bring in some lawyers eventually to sort out who is saying what

[SpiteAndMalice]

@VOLAND

I was replying to BoredEngineer, but I quoted you in my response to explain my previous post. We will have to bring in some lawyers eventually to sort out who is saying what

Okay, but I want custody of the dog