Decius

Certainly don't make each magazine its own button in the UI... but having the list of all magazines expand when desired, and show each of them along with the number of rounds present would be a nice touch. As would having weapons with internal magazines rather than detachable ones; most modern shotguns don't have detachable magazines, but instead are reloaded one shell at a time into an internal magazine, or a shell can be chambered directly. (Useful for niche applications like loading and firing a breaching shell)

Making strength gain a tradeoff that prevents TU gain is an interesting dynamic. If can either get a -1.5 reduction to the TU penalty for being overloaded or +1 TU, but not both, a soldier who wouldn't get much benefit from a higher strength has no reason to carry extra stuff solely to build strength, but someone who wants to have heavy armor and weapons benefits somewhat more from the strength than the straight TUs... until they don't anymore, and then they just get more TUs.

You've now either defined Rogue as Real Time With Automatic Pause, or Diablo as Turn Based Without Pause. Using non-functional definitions doesn't carve reality at the joints.

For all practical purposes, the geoscape IS essentially turn based. You make a handful of decisions, see what their outcome is, end 'end turn' by hitting the fast-forward button to find your next decision node.

Isn't that the endgame of Apocalypse? I found it to be an interesting concept but ended up dragging on too long.

The entire point is that you're not aiming it, you're just blindly throwing it through the door before fully opening it. It's consuming a finite resource before getting confirmation of a threat.

Of course it relies on intentional actions to destroy valuable things. Any kind of automated destruction system for the edge case of intact capture would be capable of being activated either accidentally or as a result of sabotage.

A key thing missing from X-Division is "Open with a flashbang", where there is no way to interrupt between opening the door and the flashbangs going off.

Taking away the on-screen Monte Carlo simulation of shot results would make decision-making impossible. That's because PP uses their firing system to implement positional armor and meaningful location-based damage in addition to cover and stray bullet resolution.

Save file bloat is already inherent in 'save two different states of the game'. The mission generation time is inherent in generating a new mission.

1) All three of those have abandon procedures that destroy the sensitive tech. If you eject from an F35, the software deletes itself securely; the parts of an aircraft carrier that have TS information also have hatches and bulkheads that can resist penetration long enough to shred or melt all of the information inside.

Unless you're aiming at a wall or firing an explosive?

+1 for tooltips on everything we can equip as part of the next UI pass, showing the basic info. +2 for having the ingame reference page display all of the data about weapons and armor, including range/accuracy, fire modes, ammo types... all from the actual data.

JA2 had the exterior environment revealed by default, and had very long sight range and rifle range, particularly once you got a proper sniper rifle into the hands of a sniper. JA2 also followed the 'belief state of soldiers' paradigm, and many times an enemy would be detected concurrently with them firing; there was no way to be certain that there wasn't someone just outside your ability to see.

I really, really disliked the fact that the aliens could open the door on their turn and it would close on mine, but I couldn't do the same. Would it be too hard to make the doors remain open until the start of the next turn for the team that opened them?

It's the opposite of challenging; it's just executing an already-solved problem, unless there are some complications. If there are complications, it will be briefly challenging, until a new solution is found. It would be nice to have a couple more different types of breach, rather than all of them being aliens using their big obvious door to control where we enter. If performing recovery on crashed UFOs is going to be the majority of tactical gameplay (which is not at all certain) then there are lots of ways to make it less repetitive- from just having doors that lock and resist nondestructive entry to having anitpersonnel defenses mounted on the UFO (immobile and with limited firing arcs and requiring someone at the controls inside, but with the weapons themselves very resistant to small arms fire?).

There are two schools of thought involved: Some people want their view to represent reality: If the player sees an empty room, then the room is empty; if there is doubt about whether the room is empty, the room is not (fully) displayed to the player. Others want their view to represent the belief state of their soldiers; if their soldiers don't see anything in the room, but they do see the room, those players want to see an empty room. Both of those are good systems, they just aren't very compatible with each other. Compromise positions that show confidence intervals are abstractly interesting, but I've never seen so much as a mockup of something like that that was playable, and it certainly doesn't look as good as either outcome because it needs to include both "what is here" and "certainty that there isn't more".

Low cover is a 40% reduction in hit chance, so it's better to be standing with low cover than crouched in the open. Crouching behind low cover is 55% reduction in hits ( 1-((1-.4)*(1-.25))=.55 ) 55% reduction in number of hits taken is not nearly enough to feel safe, or to be safe, but it is enough to change your long-term K/D ratio.

I hope that a paramilitary force isn't using birdshot. If they are, it would be better to model that as either a single bullet or as 40 or so. But the right projectile to use as a core case is probably not a slug (since that makes it functionally the same as a rife). Buckshot, Tri-ball (three balls to the shell, hence the name) or the Malay load (a slug and some buckshot in the same shell, allegedly named for their use in Malaysia). Since relatively few people are familiar with mixed-size projectiles in shells, I'd leave that to the modders (but perhaps write in support for bullets in a burst to not be identical). Tri-ball is the closest easily available load to what is in the current branch, and people claim to have hand-sized groupings at 40 yards with it.

The entire point of a prepared defensive position is to be unfair. I think that the way the aliens improvise an ambush from their craft is one of the best parts, and the fact that it encourages stacking is more of a bonus. I hadn't thought of using smoke grenades to defeat opportunity fire when breaching, but it would be nice if gas dissipated more slowly indoors than outdoors.

Or allow multiple soldiers to ready flashbangs for when the door is opened.

Arthur C Clarke, who among other things either initially or independently developed the concept of the communications satellite and space elevator. No human technology is ever sufficiently advanced any, because humans must understand it well enough to make it. All of the things like Prince Rupert's Drops that can be discovered by accident have already been explained.

If the exact limitations of the magic sufficiently advanced technology are never made clear to the audience, the broad strokes at least have to be made to the writers. That way you don't have one writer saying that sensor interference is preventing the transporter from working when another decides that it works faster than light and has unlimited range.

If the trajectory of each bullet is independent of each other, I could see that being the case. And there is room for a blunderbuss and a street sweeper; a melee-range weapon like the shotgun with a fire mode with even lower accuracy (say, 45% at two tiles and 30% at 3-5) but with a three-burst fire mode, for when you have multiple tough enemies right in your face, or want to open a wall.

One of the things that feels least satisfying to me is that a crate in the middle of the shot provides as much cover as one next to the target. The other is that no amount of marksmanship training is able to teach people to shoot around an obstruction. One change would be to care more about how close the cover is to the target; another would be to apply different amounts of protection based on fire mode; crouching behind a sandbag wall will provide a lot more protection from spray-and-pray shots, and substantially less protection from a single aimed shot. Also of note: Edge behavior. There are two major ways to use a corner of a building as cover; you can pop out around the corner and have LOS all the way down the wall with very little exposure, or you can back up to the wall and have total concealment but no way to see down the street. X-Com split the difference from the second way: you couldn't back up all the way to the wall, but you could stand in the center of the tile next to it, giving you about a 45-degree field of view but no cover. XCOM split the difference the other way= any time you were against a wall at one or more corners, you had to pop your head out around all of them all of the time. In general, it would be nice to be able to made modal selections between fully entering cover and sacrificing the ability to see, and popping out around or over cover to see at the cost of being slightly exposed. That would look like lying down against sandbags instead of kneeling and looking over them, and pressing flat against walls instead of standing a few feet away from them or peering out around the corner.