This has happened to me several times, and I believe I know what causes it.
Situation: I paralyze an enemy. They have received more paralyzation points than they can sustain, and are immobile. I set units on overwatch and end turn.
Enemy units move into my overwatch zones and are shot dead. This induces panic. Paralyzed enemy panics and moves immediately to cover.
Obviously this is not expected behavior-- they should still be paralyzed, no? My main problem with this is when they are only a point above acting normally again, so the next turn they might attack or recover to gain more will points.
When they move they tend to move toward cover, out of LOS of units with ranged paralyzation weapons (like the Hera neural pistol), but in one case a siren moved into a spot that had cover on all sides (my aim was to capture her since she had poison injection abilities that would have allowed me to research new tech). I could not target her while she was under cover, and had to indirectly blow her up with explosives in order to make sure she could not retaliate against my soldiers.
Don’t panic
They only lose 1 point per turn and when they are on par they are still paralysed. If they go another point down (i.e. 44/45 or something) then they have maximal 1 AP to do something, so they almost do nothing.
BTW, recovering will points didn’t help them because paralysing goes against strength and not will points.
I still consider it a problem, especially when the enemy paralyzed is one of the first encountered in a lair/citadel killing map. If I haven’t found the spawnery yet, that means I’m racing against the clock to destroy the spawnery. I don’t want this thing to become mobile again, no matter how many AP’s it may start a turn with. If it’s out in the open when I first paralyzed it and I can continue doing so, no problem. If it jumps into cover and I can’t target it to make it more paralyzed, I consider that a major problem with how paralyzation works. The siren in my example was only paralyzed down 47/46 when she jumped into 4-sided full cover-- I consider that to be a very unfair move!
An effect you inflict on the enemy should be expected to work the way it’s described, especially if you have to work at it with hazardous risk by jumping into melee range of an enemy.
When this happens presumably they can also be targeted by overwatch. So here you can have a panda with 15 extra stun value that gets killed by overwatch shots after which the non paralyzed pandas get to walk around unscathed…
