At the moment, it’s too easy to make every shot as an aimed shot, other than the fact that you stop tracking the centre of mass for an opponent once you fire, it doesn’t have much of a downside.
Linking into this there’s also an issue around headshots not having the effect that they should (outright kill when heads are disabled) because if this were possible it’d be too easy to achieve. Headshot - BB5 Feedback
For headshots in particular, but I believe this connects to all aimed shots, the problem in a nutshell is:
Assuming that we’d like headshots to be a thing - There’s two major issues:
With the current game mechanics headshots would be OP as you’d just zoom in and one shot kill everything
As a result snipers in general would be OP
So the solution needs to take care of one or more of those aspects:
Change the current game mechanics so that headshots wouldn’t be OP
-Make aiming more random. (Bigger target circle/bigger red circle/less zoom/‘shaky’ circle)
-Make aiming more random if the unit has moved during the turn
-Don’t allow units to move after aimed shots
-Remove the possibility to zoom for weapons as a standard (you could still have scoped weapons with this possibility, and those scoped weapons could have different levels of zoom 2x 3x 5x etc)
-Reduce the power/number of bullets fired for aimed shots
-Make heads of enemies a more strongly armoured area
-Make aimed shots cost more AP
-Let the unit being shot at move more/dodge after the first shot is fired (a non aimed shot would track this, but an aimed shot wouldn’t)
And/or, in some other way nerf snipers.
-Give them less movement range
-Give them less armour
-Give them lower capacity ammo clips so that they reload more often
It sounds like an overall good idea: to be honest, at first I did assume that manual aiming will be a special, more AP consuming way of shooting. If headshots were a thing, it would also make things like elevation a natural bonus.
The only problem is: when not using manual aiming, combat doesn’t look remotely interesting. Snapaiming just doesn’t provide enough information to be the basis for decision making. One needs to use manual aim, to really gauge what are the chances to hit - you can’t really properly estimate line of sight for both aggressive and defensive gameplay. Of course, one could still use manual aim and not shoot through it, but that’s adding addition hoops to jump through before every action. If the core aiming system were improved, so it’s effectively communicated bullet spread, then it is something worth experimenting with. That would be tough to pull off. The only thing that comes to my mind, is a small pop up window with manual-aiming view, when snap-aiming. Incompetent mocup, not to mention difficulties of implimenting new feature at this stage:
Sorry, but I don’t get what you mean, you can still headshot aliens and they will attack you further. A headshot isn’t better or worse than any other body part, it just disables a different ability.
Sniper have less Armor and they need movement to get up to the good places, typically the snipers are useless in the first turns to get into position. The size of the ammo clip can be reduced, that would be ok.
More armor for heads on some aliens is ok, more cost for aimed shots is bulls**, the costs are more than high enough and not moving after shooting is also bulls**, the AP concept of Phoenix Point is to be able to do whatever you want within your APs (move, shoot, move).
You may give some of the stronger perks some tradeoffs but please not in general.
I believe OP referred to another thread, where players expressed the desire for disabled head to be an immediate death, or provide additional damage when hitting the head:
It does provide. Screen you have provided is from older version of game. Just look at my last screenshot:
Highlighted part of enemy in snap shot indicates that shot have a change to go all over his body except feets. And there are aiming circles already in this view.
Downside is that you need to take more time while aiming. Those “snapshots” are still aimed shots but you can press button quickly just to not waste your time and watch hopefully how soldier tracks enemy’s centre of mass (which is not always most effective).
That’s a downside for the player themselves. Rather than it providing in-game balance between aimed and snapshots, instead if you want to play the game optimally, you are obliged to make use of the same shot type every single time.
