Decius

I would need to start at a range of about 9 tiles or less to expect to hit with 2-3 shotgun pellets if I fired as much as possible (2 snap,1 normal shot at 21/38% to hit, 3.2 expected hits) against a target in the open. If I start that close, it would be better to close to 3 or 4 tiles away and fire two snap shots at 57% or 45% for 4.56 or 3.6 expected hits with less variation, or all the way to melee range for one shot at 81% to hit for a 3.2 expected with an 83% chance of 3+ hits. I think at a range of 'across the room' (4 tiles), it should be more likely to hit with all four pellets than to hit with only 2 on a given shot. But at four tiles, the odds listed for a snap/normal shot are 45/62%, giving odds of 0/1/2/3/4 shots hitting of 9/29/36/20/4 for a snap shot and 2/13/33/36/15 for an aimed shot; you are between two and nine times more likely to hit with two pellets (likely not a kill) than to hit with four (almost certainly a kill), from across a small room. The only places in 4.1 where the shotgun is better than the rifle are 1:where you need to charge one or two enemies to negate their cover, and have a closable door and wall within about 6 tiles of their cover 2: When you can bait the aliens around a blind corner or through an open door, and have cover within 4 tiles of the other side of the ambush. Case 1 happens often enough when breaching a UFO, because the aliens will be in cover and many UFOs are very small. It does require that you have several people with lots of flashbangs to suppress the room before charging in, but that's why flashbangs exist, and you can give them to people who aren't rushing in. But the shotgun there is performing the same role that the knife should be.

It's a huge paradigm change, but rather than making soldiers more accurate with aimed shots but take the same time to aim, if aiming took less time for more experienced people? Snap shots and reaction fire taking the same amount of TUs but becoming more accurate also makes sense. The idea being that everyone knows how to and is reasonably proficient at lining up the sights with the target and squeezing the trigger, but being able to do that quickly in combat is something that needs to be practiced. Or at least narrow the cone in which 'miss' shots can go. It looks much more competent to have someone barely miss the target than to have them barely fire in the cardinal direction of the target.

One of the things I have kicking around from my tabletop days is complex 'view areas', my favorite of which started as "a 15 degree sector to maximum distance v1, a 30 degree sector to v2, a 90 degree sector to v3, a 180 degree sector to v4, and a full circle to v5. Then I masked it to 5' squares, clamped it to eight facings, and threw it away for being too complex to implement. I wonder if having a shorter 180 degree FOV and an even shorter 360 'awareness' could feel even scarier than spending TU's on situational awareness.

Yes, it would be comparable if rooms weren't the size of a football stadium that soldiers had to sprint most of the way across in a fraction of a second to get into shotgun range. The rifles and sniper rifles feel right in an open field or other exterior because of the compression of scale expected in exterior environments, but the interior environments use the same size of tile to represent a very different scale. If you gave the sniper rifle an anti-armor role, made the assault rifle aimed shot hit at least as far as the sight range, and then made shotguns drop off at roughly the size of the biggest room while firing faster than rifles, you'd still have them pretty distinct. If you can adjust the cover block percentage according to the attacking weapon, that would be even more interesting; a sniper rifle that cost more to fire but negated low cover entirely would fill a different role even if the service rifle also had a range of 'bigger than the map', and the LMG could be made generally more effective if even low cover provided decent protection from it.

If there's a complex research tree, I could see it having 'theory' and 'application' concepts: understanding the alien plasma systems would be 'theory', and the specific applications towards small arms, grenades, cannons, engines, power plants, and other 'plasma tier' stuff could have the 'plasma systems' research as a prerequisite. I don't know if there's an easy way to adjust the cost of research based on other research completed, but if so you could have multiple levels of each 'theory', such that you need higher understanding of the basics of the field to produce advanced tech, but making basic tech also gave some understanding of the field, and better understanding of the field made generating basic tech easier.

The solution for shotguns being weak compared to spray-and-pray is to give them realistic accuracy- a modestly skilled shooter can get a 3-4 inch grouping with a smooth barrel at 50 yards; someone who practices several times a week using a rifled barrel should be regularly hitting targets at 75 yards. Shot is going to be somewhat less accurate, but even birdshot is effective at ranges of 30 yards. The standard of making shotguns basically melee weapons is why they are subpar compared to rifles.

It's roughly impossible to put a nuclear reactor onto something that can fly with the usable power of that reactor. Even if you removed all of the shielding, you still need a big enough heat sink to get work out of a heat source. While flying, you're going to have to sink all of the heat of the reactor to air.

Pilots are easier to store than planes; several pilots can use the same trainer to maintain proficiency, and that trainer aircraft was going to need maintenance anyway. Pilots just have a short shelf life compared to planes. 2 years? That's from time of commissioning, which is at least 2 years into the pipeline. A pilot costs an O-1 officer and two years and some money. There's some complex math involved that acknowledges that sometimes a pilot has a chance of landing a plane intact enough to repair it.

Military pilots are really expensive compared to military aircraft. That's why military aircraft have ejection seats; the pilot is worth much more than the plane.

The real problem I had with the poppers was that they forced a degenerate tactic of handling the crash sites; anyone you send in right away is gonna die to poppers, so you have to camp the door for long time.

PP is doing exactly that as well, by allowing much more freedom in the equipment a soldier can carry but tying their abilities to their equipment.

What I'm seeing in that image is that the smallest alien is about the size of an adult human. Any plans/ideas for something smaller than a human?

If there's a hard cap to Relations that can be reached and maintained, the problem might persist. But if there's no cap or a soft cap to relations, the equilibrium is always somewhere between the extremes.

It's perfectly reasonable to make suggestions that get put into the list of features to implement. The next UI pass might not be for a while, though.

Perhaps that can be combined with the close air support problem; a crashed craft is unable to deploy anti-air weapons quickly enough to overcome the local air superiority, and destroys as much tech as possible rather than accept capture; but a craft that lands intentionally would set up sufficient AA to force an attacker to either destroy the entire site from standoff range with a saturation missile strike, or deploy ground forces to approach the hard way. In gameplay, that would mean that a craft that was 'shot down' would be 'destroyed', and leave mostly scrap and crater. One could be forced to land to effect repairs, and once grounded it could be destroyed with little risk or a capture attempt could be made. Any problems with having fewer missions to build soldier XP can be solved by changing how many missions worth of soldier XP are needed.

Earlier the alien had taken a shot at a soldier standing a few tiles away directly through both walls, but I couldn't replicate it.

I'm pretty sure it was an edge case where the lower wall is too low to block the shot, but the upper wall is too high to block it. It isn't very clear to me whether the bottom or top section is the one that line of fire should hit; imagining the relevant geometry with only the bottom wall (shooting someone on the roof) says that the shot should be possible, but also imagining the geometry with only the top wall suggests that it should also be possible. Xenonauts force-firing from t ground level further away were hitting the upper wall.

When firing up or down a vertically, walls no not behave as expected. Both aliens and xenonauts are sometimes able to fire between the bottom wall and a second-floor wall, and at least sometimes are able to fire downward through floors. The line of fire depicted goes between the wall; the alien shown fired out the wall to the street outside and later fired down into the office it is standing on. Later I was able to fire, but not see up from that office through the floor; are aliens able to fire at targets that they cannot see, or are floors sometimes permeable to sight in some directions?

If local forces started the game providing a decent amount of support, but as the aliens escalate they provide less (both in absolute terms, as the number/quality of their troops drops to attrition damage, and in relative terms, as the aliens get harder), that could introduce a clock pressure element without an artificial 'end' timer; the longer you take to start dealing with the aliens, the worse the tactical situation gets.

Adjust brightness for one and saturation for the other, and both if both apply?

As a gamer, I'm slightly disappointed in Phoenix Point going exclusive to the Epic store. As an equity crowdfunder who is getting a cut of the payment, I can see the appeal. And I, personally, started using the Epic store in parallel with Steam early this year when they gave me Subnautica. Given the amount of marketing budget they are throwing around for exclusivity deals and free stuff, I think that Epic Games is serious about becoming a competitor to Steam. Also, the one-year exclusive period, as I understand it, starts from the first sales of Early Access, so it will probably have expired well before the initial release of Phoenix Point.

Would it be too hard to include a mouseover summary of the knowledge we have in that list, and have it available on the same screen where we are picking the crew/equipment loadout for that mission?

The thing about a complex air combat system would be that it is blocking. If someone cannot perform up to par in that system, they cannot play the game. Either there has to be some 'autocalculate' (X1 had that), the skill par has to be low (X1 had that even for non-autocomplete: most fights could be won with enough aircraft armed well enough doing the default behavior, even if you could do much, much better by giving smart orders) or the players with insufficient skill to win can be excluded from the intended playerbase (which I think is what X-Division does). All of those outcomes work, but excluding players is dangerous to business. There's a lot of very good reasons to let the hardest, most complicated parts be implemented by mods, mostly related to making enough money that the team gets to make more games in the future. Also, there's no reason why the real-time air combat section is actually necessary to having lots of strategic decisions about which aircraft/armament systems are ideal for a given interception. Just have UFOs with different weapons, and have an evasion check where weapons that are easy to evade are almost always evaded by craft that are good at evading, but weapons which are hard to evade are rarely evaded even by craft that are good at evading. Fire guided missiles and lasers at small evasive craft, and dumb rockets and slow-moving magic plasma balls at big, tough, unmaneuverable craft. Assign fast, evasive craft against inaccurate powerful weapons, big tough craft against weak accurate weapons, and lots of craft against weapons that are both accurate and powerful.

Yeah, I tried to imagine the UX for that, and the only way I could think of would be to have an inventory system with an explicit 'handoff' slot on the part of the donor, and an explicit 'handoff' spot that could be picked up from. Way too much clutter in the interface, and the primary attempted use case would be people wanting everyone to fire the same shotgun in the same turn; if you wanted someone to have that gun, you would have had them carry it!

Would it be excessively difficult to make the 'ground' area also include things in the hands of adjacent 'nauts that haven't been fired this turn, or perhaps have a slot to place things in adjacent empty hands?