First Impressions & Questions

[jimbobfury]

Hey everyone,

I'm really glad I found out about this game, I've been waiting for something like this for years and after a good few hours playtime I can see that I'm not going to be disappointed.

As much as I love the game, I do just have a couple of initial questions and thoughts, primarily regarding the tactical combat in the game;

Sight range - As it is the sight radius for your soldiers seems oddly limited. It appears to be the equivelent of a soldier only being able to see about 15ft in front of them. Are there any plans to change this at all? I wondered if it was just a temporary measure until the Aliens have some proper AI. I appreciate that a large part of the game is that you have to get out and hunt down the aliens but I think that terrain and directional line of site do enough to make sure you're not aware of the location of an enemy too easily. The short sight range seems detrimental to actions such as setting some troops on overwatch while others move, as at the short ranges you can engage, this is rendered a little pointless.

Action points - Are the values for action points liable to be tweaked for later versions of the game? At the moment even reserving for a snap shot limits you to a very short movement limit. I don't want a soldier to be able to leg it half a screen and still have time to pull of a perfect aimed shot, but a snap shot, to my mind, should be a sort of last resort, just to make sure you're not completely helpless at the end of a mid distance move. This brings me onto the next point...

Accuracy of attacks - One of the things I used to love about UFO:Enemy Unknown was the tension as shot after shot of mine just whistled past an alien, and just as all hope seemed lost, one round would thud home, right between his eyes! At present, most of the shots I've fired, even if they only list a 30 - 40% hit chance, have been on target. Is this working as intended? Again, I guess once the AI is programmed to take advantage of cover etc then all accuracy values may be looked at. I'm just curious really.

And finally, just a question as to whether something I noticed is a bug or working as intended. A soldier of mine positioned right next to a window, shooting out at an alien in open ground had a lower hit chance than a second soldier who was also firing on the alien from a completely open position. The soldier at the window was closer and had a higher accuracy rating, so I can only assume that the window he was firing from was having a negative effect on his accuracy. Is this correct? It seems counterintuitive that taking a tactical position in cover would hinder you in this way.

Thanks in advance to anybody who can shed any light on the above.

jim

[TheTuninator]

Action points do feel a bit tight at the moment, but Chris has indicated that they won't really receive much balancing attention until beta phase, so that will improve. It's also quite possible to edit the shot AP values yourself in the game files; I've done it myself to allow for moving and still being able to auto-fire (though I've lowered the accuracy accordingly).

I agree on shot accuracy; shots feel much "tighter" overall, and seem to land within a square or two of the target even when they miss. I liked the fact that you could sometimes miss pretty wide in X-COM, so I as well hope that this changes.

[Chris]

Shots may be tweaked to be less accurate and cost less APs, in fact it's more than likely. Sight range, I'm not fully sure yet. It's something we'll look at in the future.

For the soldier window situation - yes, there's something like a 20% chance of hitting the window at the moment. I think we'll have to add some code preventing obstacles in adjacent tiles to the shooter affecting the accuracy calculations (unless a unit is actually in cover behind them) as presumably soldiers would be smart enough not to fire their bullets directly into something less than a yard away...

[jimbobfury]

Ha, yeah you'd hope humanity's elite defense force would have the foresight to aim through the window. I wondered if you might be able to code something into the LOS calculations which would ignore an obstruction immediately in front of the soldier making the shot, sounds like the best solution to me.

And thanks for the clarifications regarding my other questions. Good to hear that shooting might be a little more tense, with shots firing wide of the mark more often, especially with lower ranked troops. Although I guess once the alien AI gets them to take cover, this might not be such an issue.

Cheers