Return Fire - whut now?

That’s fair enough :slight_smile:

Yes, I don’t think RF, generally speaking, is ‘ludicrous’. I definitely think it can add to the game.

I simply wonder how it would feel if adjusted. Limit the amount of uses per turn or give them (greater?) ‘reaction fire’ penalties? Limited uses would allow us to ‘bait them out’ which adds to our tactical options.

I definitely like the idea of RF being impossible if attacked from behind. It would feel intuitive and also give the player another approach.

I’ll only know how I truly feel about after a lot more playtime :slight_smile:

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Ah, the old duel to the death eh? When a Pandoran and a human REALLY hate each other and it’s now a matter of honour, to hell with the rest of the battlefield :wink:

This is hypothetical?

Marbozir talked about that on stream yesterday. Could be that it is already fixed. So yes, I did not see it happen personally.

You do realize the whole marketing ploy of this game is people liked XCOM, right?

I do wish suppression was in this game, it was a great idea to add it to Xenonauts. What you’re describing is soldiers who are suppressed, and so are laying down some blind fire… which is 99% noise and about 1% value.

If you want to see some examples of how to properly use cover and shoot at enemies, take a look at a series called First Person Defender. You peek out, presenting the smallest possible target. There is no reality to this mechanic at all, you would need to be the FLASH to achieve this, and being filled with lead consistently ruins people’s aim (just being SHOT AT ruins your aim).

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Yes, but which version? :wink:

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Lots of great conversation here. I’ve gone back and played some more… and my feeling is even stronger than it was previously. This mechanic is just ludicrous, and contributes to the feeling that this game is half-baked and needed another 6 months (despite already being quite late).

There are plenty of good suggestions here for how to fix this. I consider these two to be a bare minimum:

  • Return fire is limited by remaining action points.
  • Troops return to cover before return fire occurs.

In the mean time, I’m done playing this. It’s a pity because the strategic game is quite fun. But the tactical game is just… mediocre.

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Another possible part of a solution is to make the accuracy of RT shots depend on how much damage the unit took.
more damage = less accuracy/larger circles

That combined with having units get back into cover before being RTed upon, plus not being able to RT someone behind you sounds like a complete fix to me.

Maybe a hard limit to how many times a single enemy could RT in a turn would help also, but I don’t think it would be necessary if the above were implemented.

If you did have a limit, I think 3 times per turn, or making it dependent on leftover AP. If you make it dependent on leftover AP, then I think it should only take like, 10-15% AP per shot, because realistically it just wouldn’t happen otherwise.

Obviously Ai improvements go hand in hand with these solutions as well.

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So you mean that a US soldier could only shoot from its position but vietcong soldiers could move for the same amount of time and also fire accurately to all the US soldiers that were shooting at them, all in the same amount of time ?
What you are talking about is covering fire and was present in FiraXCOM but it costs you some AP to set. In real life, you have a certain amount of time at your disposal, no more no less. If someone uses all its time units to move, I don’t expect it to do anything else. You could have a perk to have an overwatch cost “0” AP and that’s OK, but unlimited (until ammo depleted) covering fire with pinpoint accuracy in all directions that’s what I call completely “not realistic”.
You can’t expect a soldier to use covering fire on a 360° zone and in “0” amount of time. As I and others requested during BBs.

Keep in mind that when your soldiers move and/or shoot on your turn, you do it one soldier at a time. But in reality, they are all moving and firing simultaneously.
Return fire against each one of them ? Not realistic.
I’m absolutely not against enemies having actions on my turn. That’s why you set an overwatch (which costs you AP). But there it’s free time.

And I say all that as someone who never lost a soldier to return fire. I learnt how to deal with it, even in base defense mission where you have 3 crabs in an empty room and attacking them means taking 3 return fire. As you said, you can’t attack them, you overwatch and hope they will move instead of taking potshots (wish there was covering fire). If they have grenade launchers or spitter heads you have to retreat and let them separate.

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What Spite & Malice said.
There’s a whole bunch of people who don’t like what they disparagingly call ‘Firaxcom’ because it dumbed down the difficulty curve of the original Gollop X-COM.
I’m not one of them, by the way - I love XCOM, it’s probably my favourite game - or at least LW2, which fixes a whole bunch of stuff I had to put up with in the original.

But that’s by the by. Yes, this is set to appeal to X-COM fans, but like every XCOM game I have ever played, there’s a whole new bunch of challenges and different pressures on the player which you have to adjust to and deal with. Return Fire is simply another one of those. It makes this game very challenging if you don’t figure out how to cope with it, but for me that’s half the fun.

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No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just using it as a handy example of how the enemy can use RF in real life - so it’s not as ludicrously unrealistic as some people are making out.

It’s not EASY, but for me (and I think a lot of old X-COM fans), that’s the point. It doesn’t break the game - if it did, some of us wouldn’t have been complaining that BB5 was too easy - it just forces you to step out of your old habits and think differently, and that makes a refreshing change.

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BB5 was too easy because of “dash” (teleport), “quick aim” (better accuracy for one less AP) and the one that would give you AP back on kills (time travel).
I feel this mechanic is there to compensate for those inhuman capabilities and failing AI. The crabmen at least get to shoot back when you are out of cover to shoot them.

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RF’s always been there, ever since BB1.
I still remember getting totally hammered by a handful of Crabbies all armed with MGs at the start of BB2 or 3 and thinking: “OK, I’m doing something wrong here. How do I get round this?”
So while other people were screaming at the devs to nerf it, I and a couple of others were figuring out how to make the systems work for US, not the Crabbies.
Problem was, a whole bunch of other stuff got nerfed without rebalancing the Squads, so we became ludicrously OP in BB5, especially if we’d figured out how to deal with RF/Sirens/Chirons by then.

As I’ve said before, this could be easily fixed in the Difficulty settings. If RF was limited and Sirens/Chirons had lower hits &/or WP on Easy and Standard, new players could learn how to deal with them without getting wiped.

But PLEASE Devs, if you read this, for the love of PP don’t nerf them on Hero or Legendary. Some of us really WANT this to be hard.

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I wasn’t there from the start so I guess my first message about return fire was in July explaining why I disliked it. The problem was never understanding how it works and how to avoid it. It simply is wrong. It is not cover fire, it is not suppression, it’s plain wrong.

We can agree that a full turn is “our turn and the Pandorans”. Each soldier/Pandoran has 4AP. I can choose to use only 2AP on my turn and spend 2AP for an overwatch that will potentially not trigger (wasted) but I took a gamble to protect myself against flanking).
Sorry to say that but “return fire” seems to be meant for guys who let themselves get flanked (like crabmen). You spent your AP unwisely but at least you get to inflict a bit of damage to the guy who was smart.

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You make good points.

As I mentioned in the other RF thread, as it is, this mechanic could theoretically lead to an enemy getting 16 shots off (if 8 soldiers don’t move and all shoot twice) with no penalty and in ANY direction. Makes no sense thematically and from a gameplay perspective it’s counter intuitive and a poor way of increasing difficulty. In fact, it’s not even that difficult to deal with anyway, just irritating and leads to tons more overwatching.

Speaking of which, the other point you made is that in some instances we will actively avoid shooting a seemingly helpless enemy and just OW.

Our soldiers are literally saying, 'Don’t shoot the enemy while he’s out in the open! Wait ‘til he fires first or runs for cover’. Just makes no sense and feels…sluggish?

I’m curious as to how unlimited RF in all directions was created. Is it because they didn’t want enemies taking cover all the time and slowing things down? So they made enemies that are more reckless but then they realised that made things too easy so they gave them this self-defence mechanic in order to give them bite?

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That’s at least my take on it.

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Except that it’s always been there, ever since BB1. It was one of the first key differences they flagged up when they released the Build.

My take on it is that it’s a Thing that JG really likes and simply doesn’t want to get rid of, because there have been complaints (and long discussions) about it since the very first Builds.

I like it because it makes life difficult, but that’s just me :blush:

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You saying that and all the talk of return fire just gave me flashbacks to OG xcom, when you think you’re gunning down the last sectoid right in front of you, only to have an overwatch shot travel in from 4 screens away and pick off your soldier as soon as he shoots.

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Yeah, that suspense whilst it travelled was something else eh? :slight_smile:

“I feel this mechanic is there to compensate for those inhuman capabilities and failing AI. The crabmen at least get to shoot back when you are out of cover to shoot them.”

This is exactly what it feels like - the AI has trouble lining up an effective shot in the much more complicated balistics modeling that this game provides, so this mechanic exists to make sure that the AI has a chance to shoot back – in this case against a soldier who is 1) likely standing away from cover due to the stepout mechanism, and 2) who has already proven that a shot is available (by taking the shot).

" this mechanic could theoretically lead to an enemy getting 16 shots off (if 8 soldiers don’t move and all shoot twice) with no penalty and in ANY direction."

This was almost exactly my first exposure to the mechanic. It was LoL stupid. And it leads to bizarre play where I will only shoot at you if I have a good shot at your arm, but more likely, I wont shoot at you at all, despite you standing in the open, and will instead wait for my own Return Fire to trigger. This is just weird, bogs the game play down, and has no real world analog.

It feels like a band-aid on a broken tactical game.

(Sorry I don’t know how to block quote alias here correctly)

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