It wouldn’t, you could just use a decimal value of APs to account for looking around.
That’s not a terrible idea, it should take longer to make an aimed shot, at the moment there is no downside to aiming on every shot you take. (other than the real life cost to the player’s time).
I remember you mentioning it before.
While I understand the logic behind it, I don’t think I quite agree. Snap shot vs. aimed shot isn’t a distinction between actual snap shot and aimed shot, as it was in UFO, as both have the same accuracy. Still, I don’t think that would be the problem.
The problem would be that “Aimed” shot is essencially free aiming. Shooting a box would take more time, then shooting at the enemy. That would be just silly.
Except they don’t have the same accuracy, because a snap shot let’s you aim in the general direction of an opponent, whereas an aimed shot lets you choose the exact part of that opponent to aim at.
What’s silly, is having two firing systems in game where one is is always superior to the other, it’s giving the illusion of choice, where there’s actually no choice at all if you want to play the game as well as possible.
If you love that free aim system then that’s great for you because you’ll want to use it anyway, in that case maybe there being no choice there doesn’t matter to you. But I don’t, I’m coming at PP as a fan of the original Xcom games, not the new ones and from my pov, free aim got tired fast, even then I’d find it fine to use if it was situational, and there were reasons to both use and not use it, but there isn’t, it’s a dumb choice at the moment, just the tedium of free shot, after free shot, after free shot every single time. And when you don’t like free aim, but have to use it on every occasion, that’s a bad gaming experience, believe me.
But when you aim at the same spot they have identical. It is your choice to change that with free aiming. Still spread is identical. Free aim lets you change the tactic a little bit, but when you aim at something peripheral then your chances to hit enemy decrease. I suppose it is fine balance.
When you have modular enemies, then you have to use free aiming to aim at particular body part. Regular shot is just for quick finishing enemies which are not armored or close to death. Btw using mouse scroll to zoom a little bit and changing aim circle center is just a second or two. I don’t see it tedious.
I wonder what would you propose to counter that? How would you change ‘snap shot’?
To be more clear. I would even prefer your idea, but I try to think from perspective of developers and what they need to deliver for their customers. And I suppose that most of the players would prefer streamlining of this function thus free aiming works similarly to snap shooting and we don’t have different shot options.
Otherwise I would prepare whole spreadsheet how I see cost of shooting with all different weapons and different skills. But I think that would be waste of my time to create something that developers wouldn’t take into account. 
You are giving me reasons why free-aims is more effective then snap-shot without addressing issues I have raised.
That very topic was among first concerns I raised on this forum.
If I remember correctly very early on devs mentioned they they toyed with making free-aim sniper’s perk.
To me the biggest deterrent to restricting free-aim is UFO: free-aim was a special thing there. While I understand it is optimal to use it for majority of the shots, I wouldn’t forget about it’s niche use: shoot whatever you want, wherever you want, be it direction you suspect enemy is at, a box, explosive (hopefully!) etc.
No it’s not. You can zoom if you free aim, and you can’t if you don’t. that alone makes free aim far superior.
And again if that’s all it’s good for, then it’s not a valid strategic choice, it’s just a time saving device for when you can safely finish off an enemy. - A kind of, ‘I don’t need to bother with free aim here moment’, as opposed to not using free aim being a better strategic decision.
It might be that quick for you, I can assure you that it isn’t in my case, and it’s beyond tedious at this point.
You’ve got time units already, they’re just very basic for shooting. You either set aimed shots as your marker and reduce the cost of snap shots, or vice versa. From that base you can then choose whether or not to utilise perks to allow a particular solider to reduce one or the other of those costs.
All you need to do on the UI is add a marker to let the player see how far they can move to stay within their aim limit for different firing options, it’s nothing new to the TBS genre to provide that.
Yes, it would, because now they would have a worthwhile strategic choice to make when firing.
You already need to predict how much of the enemy you might see when moving into any given position where you’d free aim, the firing mode that’s available doesn’t stop the potential for an enemy to be behind cover.
You can know your preference, and I can know mine, but we’re both just one voice. Neither of us know what ‘most of the players would prefer.’
You do know, that zooming in doesn’t change weapon spread. If just for you to be able to see better. Whenever you snapshot, freeaim, freeaim with zoom - the spread should be exactly the same.
That seems to be the case for the most part. The thing that’s been brought to my attention when I voiced this point, is the difference between following the centre of mass and aiming at the specific point is space. The idea was, that when you free aim you choose direction you are shooting at, but it’s not relative to enemy. So if you fire a burst and enemy moves with animation he may “dodge” bullets.
Where is snapshot tracks and adjusts to the centre of mass.
But what zooming alone gives, that it makes aiming mode superior? Accuracy stays the same as Wormerine said.
Because it is not meant to be strategic choice with different outcomes for a soldier. Free aim is just for:
Those are not two different kind of shots. One is not ‘snap’ and second is not ‘aimed’ in the meaning of soldier doing something different. It is just for player choice if he want to correct line of fire.
Snap shot is for quick dispatching enemies when you don’t care about ammo or too much about what will be hit, because cover can become obstacle here. And it takes enemy animation into account so it can help you dispatch highly flexible enemies.
I use both systems but I don’t consider them as different shots. They have same accuracy (spread), same AP cost, same ammo cost. Free aim just helps me judge if shot from that spot is worth firing and if not then correct some shots or just give up shooting. But I don’t use it always and don’t consider it to be superior to the ‘quick shot’.
Well bugger me, I could have sworn that zooming actually did something.
I had a quick game last night, and certainly for assaults it looks like the same accuracy, for snipers it does appear that zooming gives a more accurate aiming circle.
It’s either optical illusion or a bug 
It might be my eyes… I’m beginning to wonder
Well, it looks like we can now pull up full soldier info on the geoscape, this has been really bugging me in the current backer build, they don’t show it in the video but the blue info button is listed on your soldiers in the geoscape like it is in the battle map. It does seem odd that you can’t access this info from the Personel menu though.
It would be great to see a stats button added to the personal menu next to the ‘customize’, ‘training’, and ‘equipment’ buttons.
Why would you need soldier info outside of combat? You already have all information in equipment screen or training screen (which many times were requested to be merged into one screen).
It would be nice to see cumulative bonuses all laid out, I don’t want to have to look at each piece of equipment to see the aim bonus on my soldiers. When I am equipping my soldiers I like to see a list of the stats, I also find it irritating that class skills don’t tell you the cost of WP on the tooltips, more information is better.
An example of why this is an issue is when I first played the backers build (I don’t remember which one) I really struggled using heavys because I didn’t know that they had three pieces of equipment that reduced aim, so they were a slow unit that couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn and never leveled up because they could not hit anything, it was confusing for me until someone pointed out you can boost their aim by putting a sniper helmet on them, then I looked at the equipment and realized the problem.
For me, squad based combat games with level up mechanics are all about building up my soldiers, so I also really just like to be able to look at stats whenever I feel like it.
ok. So you are missing final stat for accuracy, perception, speed and stealth. Fair then, but those can be just shown on training/equipment screen instead of bringing new screen to soldier customization. 
Yeah, that would be nice, I just jumped back in game and also realized it would be nice to be able to see the XP level that they show at the end of missions, that way if you have a character on the verge of level up you could just leave them in a base with a training center to let them level up.
this would be awesome.
oh, and one of the powerful gadgets could be electroflares!
having fog of war in only the misted areas would make a lot of sense too.