It sure would be nice if soldiers didn’t have to take turns firing on overwatch. Seems rather silly to let an enemy run behind cover while you wait for your buddy to take a shot.
it’'s a double edged sword. In other games of the genre, all overwatching soldier fire at same time if they see an ennemy move, problem is, that’s frequently “ultra overkill” like 5 guys firing at a poor things that is one hit to die, and loosing the whole squad ammo for basicaly nothing.
On the other hand, i agree that it’s anoying that sometime you have enough overwatching guys but that they prefer wait a little, a little too much x)
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You can calculate all that upfront before rendering any animation on screen. In case if enemy dies in one shot just show that, in case it doesn’t let everyone shoot and save every players time.
I am not sure if it would be possible with this system. Sure, FiraXCOM just make two dice rolls (therefore the weird things of shooting enemies behind cover and such), but in here even soldier animation is important. That lead so some really annoying results, like Soldiers shooting enemy behind wall, because by the time overwatch animation played out, enemy already passed the open space they were suppsed to guard.
It requires work but it is doable. You know how long each shot of overwatch takes, then you know how far in best case enemy will run to for each overwatch. What is left is taking animation frame for each moment of time when bullet reaches the bounding box and doing a check.
The point is we as players just need to know the factual statement at the end, of how much that guys was hit. The grity nity visual details are irrelevant in long play.
You can use this system to do even more, like by knowing upfront at what time enemy will die or dodge a cannon round, you could animate a camera or do a slow mo just on that moment.
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I would like this post, but I am out of likes. Valkyria Chronicles actually has a system for having multiple people shoot at the enemy in ‘overwatch’, if they are standing close together. In that, you don’t have limited overwatches, you just shoot at enemies within range as they move.
You could almost do this with Phoenix Point, actually… but it would take some work and some clever experimentation, so the flying pigs can add that feature.
I think having multiple characters act at once is something turn based games MUST start doing more of, it’s hideous to see individual characters moving while the others stand still, and so wait forever as everyone takes their turn, these days.
Yeah, this is the main reason they fire sequentially and I prefer it that way too.
However, I will say that overwatch isn’t great in Phoenix point. I always find my soldier firing way too early. They’ll take pot-shots at crabmen behind cover where only their carapace is showing and completely waste their shot. Or they’ll simply fire early and shoot at an enemy while they’re still half in cover, rather than a second later when they’d be running out in the open.
Maybe they would have been better off with an overwatch line system, rather than a cone. Where you can select a few specific lines of fire within the cone. That way you can overwatch an area as usual but select where the enemy has to be for your soldier to open fire.
For example, in the case of an enemy running between covers, you could put your line down in the middle of the two covers. That way the soldier only starts shooting when the enemy crosses the line and is between covers.
I guess what I’m looking for is for the enemy to freeze in place until all shots are fired or it’s dead. I’ve gotten pretty good at being judicious with the cones so that I fire into the open. What bugs me is when my second guy fires into a wall because he was waiting to see what happened with his buddy’s shot
IIRC the original XCom games gave you an interrupt in the opposition turn if an overwatch LoS was broken. You could choose to do nothing or fire.
It was neat and effective. I really miss it.
I liked the old xcom interrupt method as well - but even the current thing could be adjusted …
I understand showing the overwatch shots sequentially makes sense to preserve ammo - but why does the foe move … simply SHOW them sequentially while the enemy stands still - It just doesnt make sense that the foe moves between 2 or more overwatch shots that aimed and got triggered on the same tile .
I guess this is why have the ability to place the overwatch cone. It’s part of the gamble; we’re supposed to anticipate where the enemy will go. In theory I like it, but it would be incredibly helpful if when placing overwatch, you could also see a greyed out indication of where your other overwatch cones were. This would help solve some of the problems we’re seeing here, I’m sure.
Or can you see them already? I’ve forgotten now. lol
Id like to have an indication on where the optimum range of the weapon is as well.
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In BB5 you could see all overwatch cones. No idea why they replaced them with that silly indicator in release. Maybe to better hide the fact that AI will stroll just on the edge of your overwatch cone? 
I… don’t know if I’ve got a glitch or not but mine still shows an outline of everyone’s overwatch cones.
It shows as white outline when you want to set new overwatch, otherwise it has just a tiny indicator.
Oh, right. Yeah, the little red cone indicator coming from their eyes. I’m with you now.
Maybe the game would benefit from a tactical mode switch where everything is made grey, your units sight radius is shown as a green circle and all the overwatch markers are shown in full.