And see I actually liked those FXCOM synergies, my complaint was more that the moves themselves were just too powerful and thus contribute too much to the Snowball Effect (especially in X2). I had options on what I wanted to do:
Do I Suppression now to remove Overwatch or do I use my Assault with Lightning Reflexes? Maybe I want to risk the OW shot so that I can save the Heavy to blow up cover or for a Danger Zone+Mayhem Suppression later to finish people off (I preferred DT over ITZ on my Snipers generally).
Do I want to use the Heavy who has HT for that or for something else (Gunner/Scout is from TLW and while it was good for a playthrough I wasn’t a super fan of it).
Do I even take Executioner over Opportunist on a Sniper? Again not talking TLW. Generally no because I always felt the extra Aim was wasted along with a good chunk of the Sniper’s damage when shooting someone at sub-50%, but if I were to take it that then becomes something to factor in. Kill/severely wound X guy at the start to better prioritize who does what damage where, or save the Sniper for an Executioner shot later that might not really be needed?
As for ITZ, I don’t think the problem with it has to do with synergy but rather it’s a perfect example of a blatantly OP move (especially when not talking about TLW). The SR can 1hko a ton of enemies, especially the Plasma Sniper Rifle. This means that you don’t even have to think, you just look at what’s engaged and go “You, you, and you. ITZ dead. Moving on.”
Now I see a lot of your stuff deals with TLW so I’ll address that here. Again this isn’t so much synergy between moves as much as TLW was designed to be balanced to relatively tight tolerances. Between that and just how powerful each move was you HAD to plan out your turn in a very specific order, to include backup plans in case something went wrong. But that’s not what I would call Synergy so much as your tactics. To me synergy is how specific moves interact with each other, such as taking Holo-Targeting, Suppression, Danger Zone, and Mayhem so that a single Suppression would apply HT to multiple targets while also doing guaranteed damage.
This is just an inherent part of strategy games. We already see it in PP where you shred armor before using an Assault who’s individual bullets don’t do enough to penetrate or blow up some cover when you can’t move to get a better shot for some reason. But the big thing I would say in PP is both the TU system giving more flexibility and with an emphasis on the moves themselves not being as powerful. If I don’t have an OP ITZ move then it doesn’t really matter who wounds/kills the bad guys (though you still want to properly manage damage when able as using two Assaults to wound and then a Sniper on a 1hp enemy isn’t nearly as effective as it would have been to use the Sniper first and then only one Assault to finish it, if an Assault is even needed). If I don’t have a Suppression+HT+DZ+Mayhem combo then who Suppresses the OW enemy doesn’t really matter.
And to me that I think is going to be one of the big things of PP. By having weaker moves it makes your tactics matter more but also isn’t as much about perfectly lining up which moves when. Of course one might say that choosing the move order is enacting your tactics (and they would be right), but it felt far more rigid while also being a part of the balance problem of the FiraXCOM games imo.
Here you have some distinct action performed with some equipment, not a +25% fire damage with fireball and +1% synergy from firewall to that fireball (don’t remember exact combinations). 