Sure but then again, I have no military training which I assume that the XCOM recruits would have. Also, I’m not talking about missing a 90% shot (that’s just tough luck) I’m talking about the initial 35% hit chance against a stationary target at medium range with an aimed shot.
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Here is the easiest counter you can give to such a baseless claim: In Fraxis XCOM 99% chance to hit point blank with a shotty = 60% misses for overall player community playing the game for several months. Gee what a great and flawless system ! 
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[quote=“kompan, post:20, topic:712, full:true”]
Features to avoid in my opinion:
- One-themed mission types in FXCom - look at all the different variants:
(…)[/quote]
While I do think that the majority of missions should be about killing all aliens, I agree they could have done better with other objectives. The retrieval missions where a prime example of objectives where “securing the area” made no sense.
Minor point, but a fair one. I loved Xenonaut “farmers” grabbing the ole’ shotty and defending their turf. they were actually more than capable to defeat early game aliens
While I’m tolerant when it comes to Gremlin abilities, I’m with you for the more egregious cases, especially psychic powers that were taking it a bit too far. This power creep is sadly not limited to XCOM settings.
That is weird. Assuming you’re shooting at an exposed target at medium range, you should have your base aim, and XCOM troopers definitely don’t start with 35. If there was a thing I’d do about aim in general, it would be to increase base aim and reduce progression. It would make it less crippling to lose a veteran. It’s also annoying to have armored enemies gaining a defense bonus, because visually, shots that would probably plink on their armor are shown as complete misses, which is confusing.
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It maybe 45% but it’s real low for a new recruit. The AIM is what I’m buffing in the WeaponData ini
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I just realized there’s one thing above all I don’t want “imported” from FiraXcom : the reverse difficulty curve.
Most vets will know that, in order to win any unmodded FiraXcom, all you have to do is survive the first two months. XCOM operatives’ power ramps up much faster than alien nastiness and the game is just a victory lap as long as you have half a clue. I think both EW and WotC made it even worse, giving many more fancy toys to XCOM than the ayys.
I certainly hope PP will keep us on our toes from tutorial to the end instead.
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@Xynok : I think this should not be much of a problem, at least from the technical standpoint. With LoS vision already in the game, having realistic vision zones for soldiers should be easy to implement. BTW, I expect vision zones to be different for mutants as who knows how their eyesight might work and if they even have eyes…
@LordCrabman : I do understand where you are coming from but I think there are things in FXCom that can be used in PP without making it a dumbed down version of itself. However some things are better off left out of PP. In addition to two I already mentioned, I would call overabundance and, more to the point, high reliance on abilities which functioned in a very mechanical and game-y way with lots of arbitrary effects and conditions. I’m not against active skill and perks per se but the way they implemented them in FXCom was not so great.
@kompan : Agree with everything, especially your “magical item” point.
@Vathar : Great point on the reverse difficulty curve. Personally, I would prefer the difficulty to be rather uniform(as in uniformly hard lol) across the game with technological advancements and pandora virus adaptability more or less countering each other in terms of shifting balance to one side or the other. So while I expect endgame difficulty to be higher than early game, I hope it wouldn’t be that much of a gap in either direction; I do think challenge should come from dealing with tactical situations and strategic decisions rather than enemies simply having higher HP and armour compared to your damage dealing capabilities.
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Y’all know that the reverse difficulty curve of nuXCOM was imported from the original X-COM? In that game, the aliens are the underdogs by the time you reach the late game.
I actually rather liked it that way, because it meant that after a certain time I had earned the right to no longer fear that my tens of hours of hard work could go down the drain thanks to two mistakes that lead to cascade failures.
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@Siilk Just because the tech team -can- do it, doesn’t mean they should. My point was that a person moving their head and eyes has pretty much 360° vision around them. It may be pretty bad vision around the edges and wouldn’t be binocular but it would be enough to detect a threat. It’s board-gamey to think that the soldiers walk forward with their heads and eyes dead still. I know the team are working on some other ‘concealment’ mechanics (mist, perception… a few others I can’t remember) so hopefully that (for me) doesn’t include vision cones 
but does provide the ambush horror.
@Vathar good point on the reverse difficulty curve. FXCom does become a cakewalk and a little boring towards the end of a campaign. It should be ‘barely keeping up’ not ‘total superiority’. WotC did make the problem worse. The chosen are a pain early on but once they’re dead and you have their gear, it’s really overpowered. Plus skill combinations etc.
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You can’t have ambush and horror with 360 vision. Period. The only thing that happens with 360 vision if an alien suddenly manifests near you and punches you is the player yelling “wtf, teleporting crabmen?! this is just the AI cheating, I had vision there, I should have seen him come”. It’s unnatural and it causes frustration because it shows the game blatantly cheating.
As to counter your point in the realism factor: take it from someone who was in active combat scenarios, when you run towards a target and aim to take it down, you tunnel vision like crazy. It’s a natural reaction of the body to focus on the visible threat, especially when aiming. To simulate 360 vision IRL would mean spinning around like a merry-go-round tying to scan every area quickly and looking like a complete dork. It would also severely limit how far you are able to move withing a time frame as opposed to just focusing on your destination and target and sprinting. It’s why soldiers operate in squads and cover each other’s blind spots. and why when the fighting starts and everyone is focused on shooting in one direction, they can get ambushed from behind and gunned down. It’s why a battlefield is a disorienting place, because you can’t just have 360 vision all the time. The only way that would make sense is if you soldier spent at least half his TU allowance to scan the area around him. Simply “turning your head around quickly” 1) provides only a brief look that in battlefield conditions can miss a crapload of important details. and 2)STILL leaves a ton of peripheral vision blind spots. If anything, any argument based on realism is born out of trying to simulate real life, while 360 vision is strictly a “game” system that breaks immersion.
Or don’t take my word for it and go get into a paintball match (i’d say join the military but let’s face it that’s not for everyone). It misses a lot of what actual combat has, but it demonstrated the tunnel vision effect quite well. You go around swiveling like crazy trying to look in all directions and making yourself dizzy in the process, and everyone else will just calmly scan one limited viewcone in front of them at a time until they spot you and give you a new paintjob. I’ve seen guys like you there as well … we call them the panicked newbie. They never see you coming, sometimes not even when you are dead in front of them 10 meters away. Laser tag arenas work too, but they are far closer to urban combat simulations. Still serve perfectly fine to show how limited your vision is IRL when you are also trying to aim with a gun and be ready to fire in a split-second when spotting a target.
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I’m perfectly fine with having the upper hand “by late game” and enjoying a victory lap when you finally have the advantage over the aliens, but FiraXcom never got that balance right and the tipping point arrived way too early.
It’s obvious at the campaign scale (the first two months are way harder, but if you survive them, the 6 next ones will be a cakewalk), but also when looking at stuff like the Chosen. Taking out your first chosen could be hard, but the second and third will be pushovers because you ramp up soo much faster than they do.
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You can still have them move around blocking terrain pieces and flank. You’d see them coming out past the building but at that point it’s a bit late. Hiding in buildings in general would work fine. We also have the mist that (presumably) the mutants, or at least some of them, would be able to see through far better than you.
The rest (I’m not going to requote) I think it would be fair to say is that a) Looking quickly will stop you from really seeing anything and would be impractical, b) looking properly would take time. This is moving into the territory of having vision cones and an action you could use to look everywhere properly as being the more realistic option. Which I get by the way, it was an interesting counterpoint.
We do have a system where the benevolent overseer (you or I) has vision on what each soldier individually sees. So they turn into a kind of hive mind (totally realistic I know /s). At this point I’d be more tempted to say it’s a bad idea from a gameplay perspective (which I did mention originally) in slowing everything down being that the squad as a whole will have (usually and assumed) 360° vision OR you’d end up bringing little timmy (or any random soldier), whose sole purpose on each deployment is to sit facing backwards. Still not ideal. The thought of having to individually align 16 different soldiers (or 6) each time I moved just so I can cover all the angles properly sounds absolutely awful.
Edit: I also realise you didn’t mention anything from a gameplay perspective, merely realism. The last bit was just adding on to why I think it’s a bad idea even with the realism angle shot down.
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I’ll let the realism part to Avenger93. Suffice to say I agree with it and my experience of “tunnel vision” and deficient perceptions in dangerous/adrenaline rich situations kinda confirms his point.
However, thinking about gameplay here, I think you paint a vision that’s too dark. Xenonauts has limited vision and it plays well.
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Your point about “bringing little Timmy” has one thing for it. It highlights the fact that you need bigger squads. I agree that four soldiers (the minimum PP squad size IIRC) may have trouble covering their backs in target rich environments. However, having limited vision isn’t a major issue if you’re methodical in your exploration, securing areas and not exposing your backs.
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The practical requirement of aligning every single soldier isn’t as constraining as it sounds. First of all, any soldier taking a shot will be oriented towards an existing threat, and more often than not will stay pointing that way. Second, for those who specifically need to cover dangerous areas, orienting is just a matter of right clicking. It takes maybe two missions to start doing it out of habit.
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Xenonauts late game armors have specific vision angles. The “walking tank” super heavy armor has a very restrictive narrow cone (and other limitations such as “heavy weapons only”) that force you to support it with more alert soldiers. In return, it is really tough and allows people to wield heavy weapons like nerf guns. The flying power armor, on the other hand, has 360 vision, justified by advanced sensor technology and possible psionic/cybernetic interface, don’t rememeber, and it really feels like a late game upgrade that you’re grateful to get. I found it nice that vision isn’t set in stone and can vary depending on equipment.
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I’d argue that limited vision should at least be a feature of overwatch, especially in a game like PP where overwatch costs resources. You don’t enter overwatch at random and I’d rather not waste my overwatch shot on Crabby Mc Crabman running with a melee weapon 500m from me while his buddy is pointing his crabby/machinegunny appendage at me.
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That should be “Crabby McCrabface”.
I’m sorry, I will let myself out now.
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@Vathar I’ll have to try and either play or dig up some footage of Xenonauts. I personally haven’t played it (I’ve heard of it in passing) but if you’ve seen where it works then I’m quite happy to be proven wrong. What’s the point of having a mind if you can’t change it? 
Limited overwatch is a slightly different kettle of fish. Whether coned off or determined by set triggers, you don’t want to be wasting resources on silly things.
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I recommend Xenonauts. The cold war era starting tech gives it a nice vibe, and it plays a lot closer to OGXCOM than the Firaxis reboot.
Your point about the mist was very good though, and considering that the backer build has absolutely zero vision impairment mechanics, we could be a bit biased here. If it’s oppressive enough and allows the aliens to pull proper ambushes, this may work without even more vision impairment.
As long as we’re mentioning vision, there is one piece of equipment that can bring partial vision in a scary way : motion scanners. I always found the unidentified little dots on a 180/360 scanner very unnerving.
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Personally I liked Xenonauts, but found their implementation of the strategic game to be overly punishing. While X-Com was difficult, most of your success or failure came down to the tactical battles. In Xenonauts, a build-order fail or a couple of lost interceptors can just ruin your entire game.
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This was what surprised me the most about that one paintball match I ever played 
If you take cover, you’re blind. If you’re aiming, you tunnel. If you’re “overwatching”, you tunnel. 90° field of vision at the most!
As for gameplay: The need to spend an action keeping watch on the enemy’s turn, or surveying your surroundings on your own turn, adds a mechanic which can be absolutely crucial at the right time, but which slightly impairs the efficiency of your troops when used wastefully. Such mechanics are generally great!
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I’m just starting with Xenonauts at the moment I’m loving the limited fields of view that different solider’s have… having to move them as a team and cover for each other feels a lot more tense and exciting than when every solider can just see in every direction.
I’m not sure whether it works the same way or not yet as I’ve just downloaded and I’m waiting until I finish the first game, but you can currently play the Xenonauts 2 demo for free on gog at the moment. https://www.gog.com/game/xenonauts_2_demo
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I think the big thing that I don’t want to see if any kind of artificial altering of RNG.
If I’m presented with a 75% chance to hit something I want the game to be rolling a 75% chance, not deciding to give me an 80% chance in the background because I’ve had a run of bad luck. The numbers given are for sake of example and balance the game however it needs balancing, but please don’t have the game start cheating in my favour.
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Or against the player. The reason so many people complained about nuXCOMs RNG was because of the lazy way it was implemented. Hit tables were rolled BEFORE the fight started. The game had already decided that at some point in the mission you need to hit 5 shots in a row before even having the hit percentages available, and simply fudged the dice. But other times it would decide “nah my dude, you did TOO well, here, your soldier have gone cross-eyed now. What? 99% hit chance? On 3 shots in a row? Well you know what they say about the 1%! It happens 100% of the time when I feel like it”. The only percentages it couldn’t fudge were the 100% shots. At least I don’t think it could given I can’t recall one of those missing … they did sometimes turn into grazes randomly on non-evasive enemies but … wait … 
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