A_Magical_Potato

Well I'm sorry if I wasn't clear but it seem you misunderstood what I was getting at. As it stands shields are a "buffer" or a "second HP pool" it eats 80 damage and then goes away, yes? Well that is the entire role, and in of itself is incredibly powerful. To argue that they should be able to be healed and do more than that would be to argue that they should have a more powerful role. Although i do agree with the sentiment that the granularity promised by the "armor" system would indeed be more interesting as this allows you keep putting the solider back in the crux is how much damage can the unit take? If the unit is supposed to take 5-6 shots that would be incredibly broken and would make it a necessity to bring shield. If its only 1-2 as most people envision then what is the difference? Yes you could heal and stick the shield back upfront but game design would necessitate that that guy still dies the net shot anyways. As it stand if given the choice take 2 hits and have a unit with no damage or take 2 hits and have to heal the unit then I would take the first choice. I do wanna stress this is just my opinion though and if the game were to use your system I would not be upset and in fact I agree with you and think it would be an interesting bit of granularity and would love to see it as a mod. I just disagree with the statement that they are useless.

I really don't like how the current civi ai behaves. It makes no sense that a civ would run straight past a squad of armed soldiers, into and alien ship, onto a teleporter past another squad of soldiers that are stacked around and up into alien fire. There's stupid but this is downright deranged and suicidal behavior. Id imagine that the AI is going to be reworked and eventually saved civs are going to be counted towards your mission end score and help with end of the month calculation but as it stands they are simply moving early warning detectors. Ideally I would like to have them just run away and towards the ship.

I this this is a great idea. Might be a bit of effort but the idea that dead/captured aliens can allow for the creation of unique gear is a great incentive for the researching and upgrading of non-lethal strategies. It also creates more of a storage dilemma as it stands you can just sell all corpses and captured specimens and there's no real reason to capture besides story progression (like sure captured aliens have a higher resale but is it even worth the effort?). As it stands you kind of just need to kill and sell everything and this gives a reason to be tactful and to try and actually understand the enemy and weaponize the enemy. As long as the equipment provided are mainly side grades or extra utility I would not mind something like this.

Overall* as a xcom/x1 vet, I miss my rocket launcher. The only role my HEVY is supposed to do is knock down cover at range and it just doesn't do that well. Ideally the outer ring if the squad is the SH/SG/AR guys supported by the MG and RF in the center of the formation. The grenadier is supposed to knock down cover for the formation from the center but im finding it sorely lacks both the range and accuracy to do so. They don't have a shredding effect against amour they do bonus damage to heavy units due to penetration but that's about it. Overall I find they are less a support unit and more of an assault unit that has support capabilities. So far ive found most success by having the GL and MG anchoring my wings and the RF in the center picking off units with SH and SGs taking point and ARs filling the gaps.

Well im sorry to tell you this but X1 and X2 are both "hide and never get shot games" the point of shields isn't to make your units tanky but to give infantry a buffer, a "get out of jail free" card so to speak. The point of tactics games is to minimize the amount of incoming and maximize the outgoing damage and a 80hp buffer is massive. This means that shield units can take 1-2 hits scot free and is huge in the long run as a limiting factor even mid game to sortie rates is units getting wounded. If anything making shield into armor is a nerf as this guarantees that shields would take damage and in that case why not just bring a 2h gun and "hide and never get shot". The fact that as it stands shields act as a second hit point pool means I can comfortably get the shield in close knowing they can take 1 hit and deploy smokes/stuns so the squad can follow up is invaluable even if they lose the shield on that sortie as if they take no damage I still then follow up with a squad to the next drop. While I understand the benefits of extra armor it would arguably do the same job if not worse, that is unless it we to give such a large amount as to completely necessitate the rebalancing of the game. As it stands the current "buffer" model fulfills the design goal, an "armor" based tank that is effective would probably either be worse or overpowered as you would able to face tank and heal several hits. Overall i think that this model has great potential but im not sure if it fits into the current framework of the game and if anything would feel less realistic.

Hey just writing this to inquire if this has happened to anyone else but in my game I had held off on upgrading my "Grenades" till I had the tech for Fusion ones. What was weird though was that after completing it I got access to the Plasma rocket turret for my MARS but the grenade itself and for the HEVY was not upgraded. Is this a bug or is that just not in the game right now?