First lets recap my understanding of how this works.
Perception: This number indicates how many tiles are visible to the soldier/pandoran
Stealth: This is a percent removed from the opponent’s perception
So if you manage to have a stealth of 100% (which is possible with the Thief ability and infiltrator equipment), the perception of all enemies on your soldier is ZERO. They will never see you. Still worms feel you and explode and Chirons know you are there and will mortar your face.
Now my proposal:
Currently, if one of your team sees an enemy, your whole team sees it and can target it. Even if this enemy is outside his perception. Currently all your team gets “squadsight”. Your sniper gets to shoot its arm off although not in his perception range (I guess sniper rifles could have squadsight as an ability - or double perception - since they have a scope).
I think that unless we have squadsight, we shouldn’t be able to see the Pandorans that are out of perception range when aiming.
The same for enemies, they get “squadsight”.
It’s not complex, but the trouble is sounds, players are used of fog of war, and it makes no sense a bombard target soldiers not seen by any enemy, the problem is some enemies perhaps listen them.
The problem is player don’t see what aliens hear, and even more don’t see stealth aliens, the result is for players it’s weird even if there’s not bug in the system.
I think accuracy imitations already deal with that just fine. Sniper rifles should be able to hit anything anywhere on the battlefield with an open LOS.
I think you’re confusing Perception with Visual range. Perception is the range at which you notice something so yes it would be as you figure it. Once something is noticed however by anyone then it becomes not a perception issue but a visibility one.
Though I would have liked to see Snapshot develop the audio/Non-Visual detection of things much fuller than is currently implemented.
I like that you don’t need visual confirmation on a target to get a rough indication of location if it’s making sufficient noise however I think the system could have been a bit more fleshed out and certainly made so that enemy AI are able to act on such information.
At the moment we have a system that on the player side is driven 3/4 by needing perception detection to know something exists, and 1/4 by non-perception detection. But the AI seems to be 100% perception reliant.
There have been many situations where I haven’t had visual confirmation on a enemy location but they have made enough noise that I have the red location marker indicating their last likely position based on what was heard and can just use free-aim firing to take them down easily by firing at that location. And once you get the hang of doing things like this instead of rushing units into areas seeking visual confirmation, combat becomes much easier in so many situations. (Especially with how most standard cover typically only protects from the first and maybe second projectile before it crumbles and whatever was hiding behind it receives the full brunt of the rest of the attack)
And really, the enemy AI needs to be able to leverage this capability as well. If they can hear that I moved a heavily armoured assault behind a wall, then they should chance shooting into that wall to get to my assault, even if they can’t directly see them.
Im’ not sure to have understand your post fully (sorry Im’ an idiot as the game learned me, but I think that even idiots can post and try argue). Your complain is the AI doesn’t exploit the system as well than a player.
I’d say that this isn’t a problem in a tactical game. Game dev can’t invest enough time and money into AI and then are never able to design AI matching players. That’s why best tactical game, that require the best difficulty tuning, tend be those with asymmetrical rules between rules for players and rules for AI. Such approach dodge the problem of AI as smart than human, and give more flexible tools to tune the difficulty which is a major aspect of tactical games.
So the point you quote is firstly no way the current problem, secondly not worth the effort to design pvp game where p can be a game AI.
The problem is lack of information to player because of the system designed, and this lack of information makes the game looks weird and like cheating.
That hasn’t been my experience. AI definitely takes advantage of hearing and non visual detection. Notice that you can alert enemy even when out of LOS.