Overwatch & Line of Sight and Free Aim Summary
Great concepts… but apparently you didn’t fix the bugs present since the first beta release. Give us a break here.
If these features worked as intended, this could easily be GOTY for me, but they have a lot of quirks that need fixing.
Overwatch Grid
When you highlight an area with Overwatch, it should turn tiles affected by Overwatch to a different colour (yellow, maybe?). This way, we can easily understand which tiles the OVerwatch affects.
At present when setting OW, I end up looking at it from at least three angles to make sure the cone is pointing where I want it.
Overwatch Accuracy
OW might have reduced accuracy for balance purposes. However, OW won’t fire unless it has at least a 33%(?) chance of hitting the target. This will prevent bugs where you waste your overwatch on someone’s elbow poking through a crack in a wall.
Cover
When we Free Aim towards the cover we are using, we should free aim from an Out of Cover position. When we are setting Overwatch in the direction of cover we are using, it should also be from an Out of Cover position.
There are hundreds if not thousands of bug reports of LoS not working. You mouse over to a square, it says you have LoS on an enemy from there. You move there… no Line of Sight on them, so even the game is confused, and thought you’d have it working the way I described.
Free Aim Positions
How about adding a Crouch/Stand button, while in Free Aim? So, you can decide whether to crouch or stand while taking your shot.
Crouching might even give you a slight accuracy bonus, as it did in UFO Defence and most games, at the expense of not being able to see over low cover so easily.
Doors
If you take cover next to doors, they should stay open, unless you use a context-sensitive Open/Close Door ability which appears when adjacent to doors (like UFO Defence, you have power over doors!). This way, if you want to shoot enemies who approach the door way, you can.
If an enemy opens a door, and you can see him with Overwatch, you should immediately shoot him before he can move or shoot you, as one would expect to happen.
That first story mission, where you are getting the documents from the mansion… that was no fun to play at all, due to how doorways work in PP. I tried to defend rooms, but doors would keep closing, so the aliens just walked up, opened the doors, and blasted my hapless soldiers.
Enemy Icons
Icons above the Action Bar will turn red, if that enemy is in the selection character’s LoS. This should work the same way for the icons above an enemy’s head in the grid.
So, when you select a character, you can immediately look at an enemy on the map and tell if he’s in your LoS. If his icon is red, you can shoot that one. That’s much easier than having to click on all the aliens’ icons above the Action Bar, and work out which one is which.
High Ground
This is covered by Cover, high above this section. But we still need to point out that high cove is SPECIALLY messed up. You might need to add a leaning over the rail animation/position, so that high ground is no longer annoying and useless, due to what becomes an annoying LoS mechanic.
