Fix* Quicker enemy/neutral unit activation *idea

Phoenix Point
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Edit Note: the op was an idea to make some sort of quasi simultaneous system to make ai turns go faster…After some thought, I proposed a newer idea that simply had to do with the speed in which enemies activate their units, which would essentially accomplish in very fast/streamlined turns for ai, without losing the intricacies of what they actually do on any given turn.

OP:

One thing that bugs me about these games is the seemingly excessive downtime brought about by waiting for this dude to move, that dude to move, this other dude moves, then this dude, then that dude, then this one dude moves here and takes a pot shot and moves away…and was wondering if there might be an opportunity to mitigate this in a fun way.

What came to my mind was:
1)You play your turn out as normal, taking all of your meticulous moves and shots and abilities and stuffs and hit end turn.
2)Enemy turn: all of the enemies take there turn in what seems like real time. What they’re actually doing is just playing out there actions in the regular sequence, but a few milliseconds apart from one another. From your perspective, you just see this “OMG! THERE FRICKIN RUSHING US!!” and then it’s over and get to take another turn.

Problems with this idea:
-Well, how do you account for things that enemies do that cause obstruction in paths? for example, what if an enemy fires off a grenade that blows up a floor that the other enemy would’ve jumped up towards, assuming the moves are all fired off simaltaneously in this proposal of mine.
-Answer: Create a logic that allows enemies to acknowledge that one is running down this path while and create an action that works. For example if…
Alien A: has to run towards a soldier that is 8 tiles away to maul him.
Alien B: Move into range to fire a grenade
Alien A: hits the soldier, with the action (assume it’ll take 4 frames) and runs out of range by 2 tiles.
Alien B: Waited on the spot until Alien A ran through all the frames it required to hit the soldier and retreat to not take grenade damage.
What this waiting period could look like (assuming each tile moved is a frame in this system):
8+4+2= 14 frames.

You could possibly create this logic were alien B will hit that soldier, but due to the conflicting schedules with Alien A, would also add the waiting and what not to it’s sequence.

Pheonix Point, being a single player game, could possibly benefit from something out of the box like this. Even if it’s implemented post release. Being able to speed up great big battles like we’re going to see in the later game would be a great boon to the genre imo

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It’s a tough nut to crack, but I agree it’s something they should look at, haven defense missions are annoying when you have to wait for every single civvie to take like 2 steps and then cower again x_x

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I think it is too late in development to change how the turns play out. The turns can only be optimized.

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Simultaneous movement was used in Laser Squad Nemesis, however the game was PvP and effectively worked as an online play by mail game. A human player is able to consider the impact of each soldier’s actions and play moves accordingly in this fashion.

With PvE I think the AI would struggle, if you program moves to all instigate at the start of a turn I think you would have situations where every alien moves to attack the same target even though only one of them attacking might be enough to kill it, as soon as the target was killed by the first alien, they’d all turn in unison to attack a 2nd target and so. PP is a pretty complex game, especially with destructible, and therefore changeable, environments.

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I might not be explaining this properly. I suppose what I’m proposing is a more “Pseudo simultaneous movement” rather then an actual one.

What might make more sense is contextualizing it like so: In xcom 2, they have a feature were you didn’t have to wait until individual soldiers moved before moving the next one. So, you could in theory, have 2 soldiers sprinting simultaneously (or carrying out there move animations) on as you allocated moves. This is another feature I hope that this game gets with the final build, but in regards to aliens:

Maybe, instead of the crazy system that I proposed above, the AI could just select it’s moves quicker. So like a real player, in the xcom 2 situation, you could theoretically have a batch of aliens move at the same time (or at least really close in succession to one another), while slowing down to normal pace while taking the shots (which is important information anyways)

That said, this would essentially cut the civilian movement turns down to a quick breeze as none of them attack anyways.

Hope this makes more sense, I wish that I just thought of this simpler idea to begin with lol!