Any of that only applies if you presume your guys are armed with initiative of a wet paper bag. Give the soldiers some rudimentary smarts and they lift a lot of the micro off your shoulders while you can concentrate on bigger picture and e.g. direct aiming on a particularly dangerous enemy.
It’s been done several times quite nicely, and e.g. In Xcom:A you can let it run at half speed to help stay on top of things. Yes, you give up on micro and game can’t play like a puzzle against completely overwhelming enemy but I hardly see that as a problem.
One of the 3D JA clones took half speed idea and let you plot routes for your guys in advance etc. Worked quite decently but unfortunately the AI was real crap so they boosted AI aiming so they’d be about as accurate standing up firing snapshots as your guys prone taking aimed shots.
After-series had the problem that AI was completely non-existent, your guys wouldn’t even shoot without being told to. Pauseable real-time built like turn based, yuck.
Oh come on, route finding has been resolved decades ago. Just because some games are spectacularly bad at it doesn’t mean its not perfectly possible to do route finding in 3D environment, especially as simple as in PP. Almost everything is block/no block divided into squares, with some bits being possible to cross over. There’s no fundamental reason why wego or pauseable real-time can’t use squares to start, the main selling point is simultaneous execution, not arbitrary movement.
I think the problem is not route finding, it’s decision making. How to make the AI plan smartly what to do in the next 5 seconds. However, I’ll be very happy if I’m proven wrong as soon as possible and something like LSN is somewhere in the works.
Yep, I don’t have a problem with how they tried to work around the problem of the massively different abstraction levels, its a very tricky problem to deal with, the problem is that they allowed such a massive difference in the abstraction level in the game design!
If the abstraction levels aren’t close, bridging shooting and movement is almost impossible to do well, the gap between them is enforced at the most fundamental level of the game which is a massive design flaw that its nearly impossible to fix.
X-Com (old ones) worked because they used a similar level of abstraction for movement and shooting. The newer XComs abstracted them both further, which was fine because they were both still on a similar level of abstraction.
PP has however tries to make the shooting use a very low level of abstraction, while all the other parts of the game are still at a very high level of abstraction. To really have the option to have manual shooting and aim in this sort of game, you’d need the soldiers to NOT stand stationary, to be constantly moving or actually using cover instead of just standing near it e.t.c.
This desync between the abstraction levels is the problem, not the mechanism they tried to use to bridge it.
The X-Com one worked apart from the face huggers running round the corners and doing their face hugging thing before any of your guys ever reacted
I quite liked that mode but it did clearly need more work. Not sure why none of the XCom successors haven’t gone down that route yet. With modern AIs it should be relatively easy to make something far better than Apoc now.
Not sure why you think that it would be harder to write an AI for this than it would be a FPS game?
So we already have bots that do literally do this in real-time. You could literally just run the bot for 5 seconds then freeze it.
To be honest, it’s slightly bewildering to me that someone hasn’t just taken a game like Unreal or CS, added a isometric view to it and bot control and used that as a basis for a strategy game.
No real time with pause ever solved the problem, a free space for movement, is blocked at 4s because of the move of some other unit, the AI is lost and compute the new path and apply a totally stupid long path because it’s the only way to reach the target.
Just one example or “the” example? Yes, traffic jams are problematic, in turn based you can have everyone running through at maximum speed like robots and in wego etc a jam is created if everyone wants to go the same way. Ever commuted to work?
This is mostly an issue with tile - based games like PP, in free-form maps there’s usually enough room for people to mingle. “Totally stupid long path” depends entirely on map, can be tempered with routefinding persistence when blocked, mitigated by periodic refreshes etc.
In fact traffic jams are an example of something that simultaneous execution makes much better than TB. You can’t just magically run everyone at full speed and stack them perfectly on the other side of a gap. That sort of thing is rather hard to do in reality as it is in pauseable rt.
I assume that it is more difficult because it’s not real time, they are still turns only resolved simultaneously. In a real time game you can tell the AI when so and so happens do this, and it can react instantly. In a turn based game with simultaneous resolution you have to consider all possible moves for both your and your opponent’s troops before committing your turn.
Have you played Frozen Synapse? You can spend an hour thinking about what to do in the next 5 seconds with 2-4 guys. That’s why the singleplayer campaigns in both LSN and FS were meant as tutorials for the multiplayer.
Phoenix Point has a very detailed ballistic system. Each weapon has following attributed designers can play with:
-accuracy - effective range
-demage per single bullet
-overall potential DPS (DPT?)
-action points required to use
-ammo
-penetration
I think there is more, but that’s off top of my head. That’s a lot to properly balance, and make most weapons useful weapons.
Tinker with existing mechanics before slapping another ones on top. Abilities seem to be the bigger offender then weapon design - being able to use sniper-rifle like a machine gun, or using “dash” to mitigate danger that comes with using a short range shotgun.
I would say these are the minimal attributes required to have a ballistics system at all. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, just that it’s not enough to, for example, make SR less useful at CQC, which is why some of us are suggesting a “pressure” mechanic.
I agree that this is basically the case with PP, that it goes for relatively high abstraction on everything except ballistics. I really like this approach though. It reminds me of playing with toy soldiers and simulating the shooting with a small sling.
Ok probably the biggest example to explain it ends in AI playing for players. But AOE is another perfect example. I know that it can be a part of complexity to anticipate, but at end it’s still either totally static and many players complain, and objectively it minimize a lot use cases. Or it’s AI playing for player.
Another example, get a surprise sniper blast, and continue rush to melee a few seconds, totally weird or AI playing for player.
You didn’t get it, it’s not traffic jam from soldiers of the squad, it’s robot soldiers following a 5s order despite there’s a huge changes on enemies side, or a huge injury, or many other aspects.
Solution should be fairly simple: while sniper rifle doesn’t get worse in Close Combat, it doesn’t get any better either - it’s effective range is far, but should be underperforming in close range when compared to other weapons. Plus, 3 action points mean one shot per round, compared to two auto shots.
That is completely thrown out of a window when one one can empty a sniper rifle in one round, or fire two shots with even better accuracy. In addition, high relience on armor makes single shots more desirable. And overall design problem, rather then something limited to weapon design.
PP problems don’t arise from not having mechanics from XCOMs - it’s systems have more depth then FiraXCOM. But they are not utilised as efficently.
I could envision a mechanic, where when an enemy is standing next to your unit it gets a “distracted” debuff - minus to accuracy. But I doubt it would be any effective - with free movement one can step back without an issue, and with sniper accuracy it would need to be an really powerful debuff to make any difference. Even if one couldn’t shoot at all for some reason, it is not of importance and taking step back is not an issue. More complications and mechanics, without actual depth being added.
