Decius

Laser target designation from ground troops is for when the opposing force has enough AA capability that your air support has to be under the horizon.

X-COM was a little bit too lenient, in that the power sources would wait until the crew of the craft had already exited and taken up defensive positions, so only the crew that stayed in the craft could be hurt by the explosions.

For the time it would take to figure out the appropriate time to play special barks, I'd rather have a more developed enemy AI. While the world is 3d rendered, it doesn't currently need robust collision. Physics objects and ragdolls bouncing around would reveal just how little there is. And if you're going to give soldiers voices, don't give them all the same voice. Every gender and nationality needs a couple different voices, each with enough lines that it doesn't become repetitive- but at least you can cut down on localization costs by making all the short voice lines in the native language of the soldier in question. That would bring the cost down from $ridiculous to $infeasible.

You could also fire one missile at them to bait the evade, then fire a torpedo after they evaded. You'd take some damage setting up the shot, but it could be done with one aircraft of inferior flight characteristics.

How hard would it be to reduce the damage done by the laser per shot as the power cell is depleted? That would make the choice between bursts and aimed shots much more significant than 'will I run out of charge before I run out of enemy?'

My headcanon is that the 'covert' nature of the mission is why there isn't a 105mm artillery piece flying around, and why the craft doesn't have a minigun hanging out the side. Part of the mission is to make the people wearing off-the shelf suits and flak jackets with "TLA" stenciled on the back have to divert as few civilians as possible. The gossip over a couple of helicopters flying around is much easier to quiet down than gossip over a couple of helicopters flying around shooting.

My high-reaction soldiers have melee weapons (shotguns) because I need them to breach and clear UFOs. I suppose you could use the rookies as distractions for hot LZs, and they would only need enough reaction to get away from the non-ablative meat.

Oh, if the turrets don't kill or suppress all of the enemies that can offer reaction fire into the dropship on the first turn, they don't satisfy the primary purpose for which they were proposed. Making them only as good as a machinegunner is at that job is like suggesting that someone use a machinegunner to suppress aliens to prevent reaction fire from wrecking everyone.

Yes, rewarding players for pulling enemies into an area where they have automatic suppression is a degenerate behavior. Close air support is part of the dominant real-world tactics precisely because it isn't even remotely fair. Games are intended to be fair and challenging in a way that a well-planned military operation isn't.

Yeah, the intended gameplay change of having turrets on the dropship would be to prevent having the entire craft one-shot by good enemy positioning. But enemy positioning can be controlled directly, and if the turrets are effective at their primary role then they will create the degenerate behavior of baiting enemies into their killzone for free kills; if the turrets aren't effective they will not accomplish their primary goal.

Crouching stacks multiplicitively with cover already. But crouching behind low hard cover should stack additively; your profile is reduced by 40% from crouching, and 50% of your original profile is behind hard cover, all of which is part of you newly reduced profile, giving a 90% reduction in exposed vulnerable area. Yeah, that's very OP, resulting in a need for flanking tactics, ways to neuter prepared positions (smoke their lines of fire), weapons that bypass hard cover (grenades, indirect fire), weapons that penetrate hard cover, and suppressive fire).

It's also not quite literally true; that charge can penetrate a piece of explosive reactive armor that will not be penetrated by a shaped charge that would penetrate 750mm of hot-rolled steel, which is much different then being able to penetrate two and a half feet of steel itself. It will, however, have no problem putting a hole straight through anything that a modern non-nuclear antiaircraft missile would damage- modern AA missiles basically throw a bunch of metal at the target, which will penetrate human airframes and hopefully break something important, with some variation for patterns of that metal that are more likely to hit something important.

Now it's starting to sound like the salvage/loot system from Battletech (2018, HBS): A clearly gameplay-centric system that describes itself vaguely as just a complicated contract negotiation.

Clustering is a worse idea against someone who is going to throw a lot of high-energy things in your general area than someone who is going to put one high-energy thing in your top left incisor.

The PG-7VR projectile for the RPG-7 was introduced late in the cold war, and if it doesn't penetrate UFO hull than antiaircraft weapons have no chance of doing so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PG-7VR

With one tile being equivalent to 10m for the purpose of weapon ranges, the accuracy of sniper rifles is such that the optics rails are being used to line up shots. Which is fine, considering the lack of a prone or bench rest shooting position.

I guess I just don't see the immersive nature of having to click on "Order a bunch of nameless people to do their only job" periodically. Honestly the entire system of setting research goals could be changed to automatic without more than a pacing rebalance.

A more complex system that allows gradual destruction might be interesting; Machinegun fire from moderate range might cause enough damage that the airframe can be seen through well before it does enough damage that the hole is big enough to walk through. Oh, and "Small arms" generally means "any weapon that can be carried by one person". A light machinegun with skittles rounds is technically 'small arms'.

Somewhat related, in that I think it's an easy change to make: Can the alpha test starting lineup of soldiers have some rookies, some experienced soldiers, and some veterans, with a clear indication of the experience involved? It's hard to get good intuition about balance without seeing how different levels of soldier handle, and being able to get experienced soldiers has dependencies (including balance being reasonable).

How is that meaningfully different from turning the loot into materials as soon as it is researched, and then using the materials to make useful things?

Is there a mod for SS that removes the total skill cap per level? When I realized that all my sneaking around was what was preventing me from gaining anything except stealth, I gave up, so I can't discuss the endgame. Midgame with loaded stealth is probably not the intended type of game, what with the sneaking up on people in panzerfausts and stabbing them to death.

Missing four 68% shots is over 0.1% likely if they're independent chances, even if you did manage to get six shots at a target with no cover.

Giving every soldier the same TU total and making movement costs the same means that everyone who doesn't have a TU penalty moves at the same speed, which makes all of them the same on that axis. Changing movement costs based on soldier would shift the confusion from "How much does this weapon cost?" to "how much does this movement cost?", but movement is much less urgent than shooting.

My gut feeling is that having morale affect other stats directly, along with being checked for panic, would be overloading one statistic. Splitting Fear states up a bit more would be better than using morale as a multiplier, and I think that (normal, suppressed, freeze, flee, berserk) is already as many fear states as is useful.

Does "If the path is blocked for any reason, stop when the blockage is discovered during movement, rather than reroute when the blockage is discovered" describe what you mean?