The enemy AI obviously needs more work. Between the queen running into walls and being unable to hurt players in pits and all crabmen taking potshots from beyond your soldier’s visual range, there really needs to be some improvement. It was this crabman behaviour that brought this issue into play.
Whenever my soldiers returned fire on a distant crabman they would almost always miss every shot. It was a complete waste of ammo. I went so far as swapping to a grenade or medkit at the end of each turn so that they wouldn’t waste ammo shooting back at aliens miles away. There really needs to be an option for when soldiers fire back. Let the player chose to fire back or not since ammo is so limited. In the finished game I imagine this will apply to enemies shooting from behind cover too. I don’t want half my soldier’s ammo going into a concrete block for no reason.
Additionally, it’s never safe to take shots when the enemies have return fire… The stats for their guns say they’re less accurate but very often I’ll shoot at them from a reasonable range, miss all but one shot and then they’ll hit me 2-3 times dealing loads of damage. Mostly because my guy has stood up out of cover or stepped out around a corner into totally unguarded space to shoot. If you’re going to have enemies with infinite ammo doing reaction shots it has to be after the soldier has returned to cover. Think about a real life scenario. Soldiers don’t shoot at the enemy while the enemy is shooting at them. They take cover, wait until the enemy stops and then they pop up to shoot at the enemy as they hide behind their cover. I’m sure the Phoenix Point soldiers are very brave but I have a feeling their willpower would disappear much faster if they could only ever shoot at enemies already shooting at them.
EDIT: as soon as I went back to the game my soldier got into position to shoot off a crabman claw. Then only fired 3 bullets… half ammo blocks should not be a thing. Make reaction fire free or have it take an ammo block and shoot 6 bullets (with the option to chose when to return fire). Being surprised by a half clip when I really don’t need to be surprised by a half clip is not good times. 