lemm
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Posts posted by lemm
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6 hours ago, Skitso said:
I rather enjoy the claustrofobic feeling that restricted vision cones give. It's not just a gameplay topic, but a fundamental thing that changes how the game feels.
Yeah I like the view cones too, but because they make the gameplay more complicated.
5 hours ago, Ninothree said:Maybe have the final step in line of movement cost an additional 1 TU
I like that idea. You could even take it a step further and make every (or every other) square after the first three cost one TU fewer, essentially granting the soldier a bonus for running a straight line over long distances. It adds complexity without adding in separate movement modes.
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On 6/27/2018 at 2:34 AM, Sheepy said:
Can we just try setting turn cost to zero and how that goes? Changing everything in the TU system just to solve the turning problem sounds a little extreme to. We don't even need to touch facing. If free turning is enjoyable and intuitive then we can consider whether to push it further.
If turning has no penalty then the optimal way to move anywhere is to move one square, spin around, move another square, spin around, and so forth. Which means you might as well not even have a view cone and just let soliders see in every direction like starcraft units. Personally, I've never used the time unit reserve because it's more trouble than just doing simple arithmetic and even if it wasn't, I wouldn't find it useful. I don't tell my units to walk in some general direction until they have just enough time for a shot; I want them to go to a specific point and if I know that they won't have enough TU to do what they want when they get there, then I come up with an alternate plan.
In my opinion, the TU reserve was really only necessary for XCOM and TFTD because there was no time unit preview function like there is in Xenonauts. I think you could just get rid of the feature or at least not spend time worrying about it.
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On 6/23/2018 at 9:34 PM, Decius said:
Would it be possible to have "Movement" points and "Action" points, where every healthy soldier has 100 AP (that can be used for actions or movement), and rookies have a handful of MP (which can be used to move and turn, but not attack or open doors or juggle inventory), while experienced soldiers have more MP but the same amount of AP?
...It is often frustrating that we can't walk towards someone while firing a shotgun (think Sean Connery in The Untouchables) without getting fewer shots.
Seems like what you're saying is that there should be arm points (what you call action points) and leg points (movement points). I've been mulling this over, trying to figure out how it would work without requiring the player to do two parallel sets of arithmetic for both movement and actions because it sounds like a neat idea and because I like your cinematic reference
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Introduction. Let's start with the simplest solution: every soldier gets as many arm points as he does leg points. Say Mr. Connery starts with 60 points per turn, and that firing a shotgun takes 20 arm points and 0 leg points because he can fire while walking. If he stood completely still while firing and reloading, then each shot would take 20 arm and 20 leg points. And if he did something like shoot while still, but walk while reloading, then each shot would consume 20 arm points and 10 leg points. Now, even if Connery can fire while moving, he is still not allowed to spend all of his arm points before he uses a single leg point. The reason is because his arms and legs are bound in spacetime. In the director's cut where he spends all 60 arm points and THEN spends all 60 leg points, his upper body is hovering in place firing shots while his legs are walking down the hall to greet the mafioso with a swift kick to the crotch (sadly, this version of the film was never released).
Rules. Putting this all together we derive three rules. I'll go back to calling arm points as action points (AP) and leg points as movement points (MP). Both AP and MP are expressed in time units (TU).
- Actions always consume AP, and they can also consume MP if the action would impair motion, but consumed MP <= consumed AP because the action encompasses the movement and not the other way around.
- At any point, AP <= MP. AP can never exceed MP because this would mean that the soldier's upper body would be effectively lagging his feet.
- To perform an action, AP == MP. This is the corollary of rule 2. If an action were to be performed when AP < MP, this would mean that the soldier's upper body would be jumping ahead in time before his legs could have caught up (or to put it correctlier, that he is performing the action at point A when his body is located at point B)
Example. Every soldier now has an AP bar located right under the MP bar. Let's say a soldier starts out at full AP and MP. He is ordered to move somewhere, and as he walks along, his AP and MP decrease in unison as per rule 2. He sees an alien and takes a shot, which he is allowed to do because AP == MP as per rule 3. He shoots a quick shot which misses, and some AP but no MP is consumed, so now AP < MP. Now he runs to find cover, and as he does, his MP decreases. He finds cover and lines up a second shot, but still, AP < MP because he didn't walk very far to find cover. However, he wants to shoot from this position, so the game forces him to dump excess MP so that AP == MP, thereby allowing him to take the shot as per rule 3. This time, he takes a fully aimed shot that costs MP equal to AP (which is allowed as per rule 1). The turn ends with his AP == MP (although it would have been legal to end his turn with AP < MP, because ending a turn is not an action).
Comments.
We have a third bar for action points in addition to those for hit and movement points. But I think it would be easy to get the feel of the action point system after a few battles because of how the time unit bars tick down in real time as the soldiers walk along. However, because one turn's worth of time is scaled differently for each soldier according to his MP, that means a rifle shot is going to take proportionally more AP for a more experienced soldier, and we really didn't solve that problem. So I don't know if it's worth the extra complication.
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Mind control made xcom and tftd a cake walk. It's a fun mechanic but if every soldier or alien has access to it then it ruins the game because it becomes neither fun to wield nor to play against. Only 10% of aliens and soldiers should have full mind control abilities if it's included in X2.
Edit: And to address the OP, yes, any soldiers that happen to be under mind control when the last alien is killed should be returned to your command.
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Yeah this is a good point. Morale wasn't very interesting in the original XCOM because as you say, either everything was fine and dandy until one too many of your guys dies, and then suddenly everyone starts panicking and it's a downward spiral from there. And when your squad members do start to panic, you can't really do much about it.
I think that the morale system might be more interesting if its effects weren't so pronounced. Like maybe a panicking soldier would not lose all of his TUs, but be impaired more slightly (like he is unable to run towards the aliens, he's unable to throw a grenade but can still shoot a gun, and so forth).
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I bought this and I liked it. What I liked most is that the game is very conservative-yet-efficient with its use of randomness. Combat doesn't depend on dice rolls except for two specific situations (power grid damage and unit spawns). Like FTL, weapons deal damage in small, integral values which makes combat feel more like chess than XCOM. The rest of the randomness is at the level of the geoscape (which maps spawn and what rewards drop after a zone is saved), and this macro-level randomness has more of an impact on the game than the randomness in combat.
I didn't really like the atmosphere. Everything is really dreary and all of the pilots look depressed (except for the Margaret Thatcher character
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On 4/19/2018 at 3:37 PM, Chris said:It's a funny one - it's undoubtedly an incredibly clever game with a huge amount of awesome design crammed into a tiny space, and a setting that I really like ... but I don't feel much urge to play it any more after having completed a 4-island run with the starting mech team and getting all their achievements (whereas the thought of doing another FTL run is still an exciting idea to me).
I'd say that I was impressed by Into The Breach, rather than that I enjoyed it.
Neither did I like Into the Breach as much as I enjoyed FTL. I think this was because there was no feeling of adventure that FTL had. In FTL your ship goes on a little journey and there are events along the way, so each run is like a little story, whereas a playthrough of ItB feels more like a chess tournament.
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I haven't played this game in ten years or so, but from what I remember, the cult of Sirius was little more than a minor annoyance and the rest of the other "factions" didn't really matter. I agree with jamoecw that it had a lot of neat ideas that weren't really that well polished. And like the other DOS XCOM games, as soon as you could produce the wonder weapon (the toxin gun in this case), then the game just became a cake walk.
Anyway, if I made apoc2, I would remove the capability for XCOM to research or produce its own equipment so that the espionage and economic aspects of the game would be more important. Instead of building the facilities in your own base, you would outsource that work to existing laboratories and factories owned by other factions. Also I'd get rid of the real time combat.
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$100-$200 tier: you get to design a humorous billboard prop that will show up in city-themed maps. The donor provides the billboard content (slogan + design) and the art team makes the prop for it.
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Okay, I have two things to say about XCOM and Xenonauts.
1. In these turn-based tactical games, when a human is facing an AI opponent, I think that tactical situation becomes easier to process for the human player as the turns get more granular. By "more granular," I mean that a player (artifical or human) gets more opportunities to add input per turn.
For instance, Frozen Synapse and Lethal Tactics allow you one chance to per turn, and both sides move simultaneously. It's basically the most granular form of strategy. On the other hand, in UFO:EU and Xenonauts, one particular action consumes a fraction of a percent of a turn; the turns are very granular. New-XCOM is somewhere in the middle. I hear a lot of people saying that they think the simplified movement system in New-XCOM makes the game less complicated, but I think they're not looking at it from the perspective that I've just presented. In fact, they added all of those time-based missions in XCOM2 so that you couldn't just scoot your soldiers along, square-by-square. It really makes the game more interesting when you're not always allowed to run behind a corner as soon as you spot an alien.
I know I've echoed these sentiments in a bunch of different posts in the Xenonauts 2 Suggestion forums, but after thinking about it, the input-granularity really is what really defines the tactical layer of a turn-based strategy game. (At least in my opinion.)
2. In Xenonauts 2, I think that right after your soldier makes a round-ending kill, there should be a close-up shot of him delivering a cheesy line that you might see at the end of an action movie from the 80s, right after the bad guy is killed. You know, something like Charles Bronson or Bruce Willis might say. I am being completely frank when I say that this one little feature could catapult Xenonauts 2 sales from Indie to AAA-levels.
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It sounds like progress is much more rapid than it was for Xenonauts 1, which is great to hear!
It's also good that you're making the game playable while it's in alpha. I think this will really help to make the finished product more strategically interesting, especially if the community makes a commitment finding the quickest and most reliable way to beat each alpha version.
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I think the art in Xenonauts looked very drab and schematic, but not "bad." The same is true for the UI, which was tidy and flat in comparison to the original XCOM, which had gaudy, bevelled buttons everywhere.
hmm, what about low-poly-nauts
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I like the idea of aliens gaining resistance to weapon-classes. It think that this single mechanic should help to substantially differentiate each playthrough. Doubly more-so if each class of weapon isn't just a different flavour of rifle, but has its own characteristic with regard to engagement distance, spread pattern, on-hit effects, and so forth. Along with the troop teleporter and the base power, I think this is one of the best features that's been proposed.
I like the system of renting out research facilities, because I think it could be the prime source of strategic volatility to the Geoscape. I see a couple of ways by which you could tune this system. First, what is the number of research buildings that the player will have under his control at any time? Two, six, a dozen? I'd opt for fewer, because I think it makes fighting to keep one more impactful. Secondly, what is the penalty for losing one of these facilities? Do you lose the money that you paid for it, or are you renting it out turn-by-turn? Do you lose all research progress on an item being research in a facility that is captured, or is the progress (partially) saved? If the geoscape game ever doesn't seem exciting enough, I think that nudging these two variables to the "all-or-nothing" direction might liven it up a bit.
I also really like the part about "choosing an acceptable rate of attrition." A hard timer is often necessary in complicated strategy games like this, simply because the player can usually beat any AI if he's just given an infinite number of turrs. I think this is what motivated Firaxis to include such a high proportion of timed missions in new-XCOM 2, compared to the original new-XCOM. I suppose that the original XCOM and Xenonauts had a timer of sorts, because in both of those games, you can't reclaim a territory once it has been lost. Still, the way you've presented this idea makes losses seem a lot more fine-grained than losing an entire geopolitical bloc. Hopefully, Xenonauts 2 will be balanced so that you can't ever reach a point like you can in pretty much every other XCOM game where it's impossible for the aliens to make any further progress.
Recently, I've been playing a lot of Brogue, a roguelike that is notable because almost every non-consumable piece of equipment in the game can be upgraded at the cost of a scroll of enchanting. What's interesting is that the power of an item increases quadratically, or even exponentially, with respect to its enchantment level, so it's often the case that dumping all of one's enchantments into a single item is far better than spreading upgrades over a few items. Because of this, I think you get a lot more variety in playstyles than would be the case if upgrades provided diminishing returns. Basing playstyle around a single, powerful item leads to a lot more volatile situations than working with an arsenal of moderately powerful items. Of course, Brogue is a game that takes 3 hours to complete and in which even the best players die about half the time; such a design choice might not work so well for a game that takes ten times as long to play through. I just mentioned it because I thought it was an interesting way to design an upgrade system.
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New trailer. Looks sort of like XCOM Apocalypse.
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4) Combat Mechanic Changes: A few changes to the combat mechanics worth touching on, I think. The first is the much heralded concealment mechanic, which is initially fun but I actually don't find has much impact on the gameplay. I started ignoring it entirely in the later stages of the game (it only affects the first fight) and I still did fine.
I don't think that they could make this very impactful, because the fact that aliens can always see you in Nu-Com is the reason that the Nu-Com battlescape so much more balanced and difficult than XCOM and Xenonauts were, imo.
The null lance, which allows you to hit everything in a straight line
I've only played XCOM 1, but I like the idea of this. Weapons that allow the player to abuse the geometry of the map like this are fun, even if they're farfetched.
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https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/02/10/frozen-synapse-2-announced/
http://www.frozensynapse2.com/
The sequel will be "open world," unlike the first game, which was a series of missions.
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But that means that you lock yourself out of using pistols all game, and have less tactics (and thus fun) available.
Disagree. Over multiple runs, having such restrictions makes the game more fun, because it forces you to make an appropriate beverage with whatever fruit the game dropped at your feet. Humans can be rather resourceful when it comes to exploiting a video game.
If you wanted to make the classes feel distinct we need to make them wildly different in operation, not just vary their damage and penetration bonuses.Yes, I've made this argument here before, and I think that it's a good idea, but it's not enough on it's own. I think there needs to be a second "major dimension" to different weapons classes, and I'd suggest that different types of aliens should be differentially vulnerable to each class of weapon. (And I'm not just talking about a damage multiplier either, but perhaps its behaviour is altered by that class of weapons somehow). Then you have this invariant characteristic of the weapon (short ranged, long-ranged, powerful-but-slow, weak-but-rapid-fire) that is orthogonal to the type of enemy you'll be fighting.
I also like the idea of missing a certain model of each weapon from each class as you've suggested (e.g., no laser shotgun, no plasma sniper, no MAG machine-gun, or whatever).
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Oh okay, well that sounds like a good game plan then. I like how the research web has overlapping technology streams and how upgrading a region represents a commitment that will have lasting consequences.
I hope that "activation," "upgrading," and "terror levels," can be implemented by concrete ideas or "things", as much as possible without breaking your game model. Maybe to activate a region, you could quickly erect a prefabricated teleporter node (several of which you happened to have lying around before the virus hit), or something like that.
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You would probably hold a key like Alt to display all possible lean destinations, then click on the one you want the soldier to move into
All possible lean directions? Isn't there only one direction, which is around the corner?
I thought XCOM 2012 handled it well: if you want to remain completely concealed, move to the square next to the corner. Otherwise, if you stand next to the corner then you can shoot around it, but you're also exposed (though you still get a cover bonus).
Maybe the walls could run through the middle of a square, instead of along the lines of the grid, in order to make this more visually apparent.
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Well, this sounds a lot better than the Cold War thing you originally proposed a few strategy threads ago. I really like the teleporter idea. With a little bit of sci-fi magic, it eliminates all of the inexplicabilities regarding aircraft that cost less than a sports car and can be constructed in a few days, along with terror sites that mysteriously remain active until you address them.
The "base power" seems like a good idea too, as well as the decision to simply scrap the traditional base construction system. I like the turn-based system for the Geoscape.
I dislike "terror" represented as an integer. I think that the loss condition could be more organic... like maybe a region is lost when its airforce or its population dips below a certain level? Or maybe the aliens sign a pact with a region. Or maybe you fail to defend your base once. Or maybe you discover that there's a large alien fleet coming and you have a few weeks to figure out how to capture a small alien scout in working order so that you can fly it into the Alien mothership and take out the head honcho alien.
I think that the rest of the outline is rather vague.
What is "industry," and why are the Xenonauts directing it?
I don't understand how I "activate" a region, or how an attack "destroys a soldier slot." Like, what do those even physically mean? The region won't let me on its turf unless I pay it money, or something? Do I even need their permission if I have a teleporter that allows me to blink in and out at my convenience? From what you've described, the Xenonauts seem completely self-sufficient and they don't really need the approval of any supranational council in order to operate.
What are these aliens doing in their terror missions? I'm wondering if, this time around, the missions could be extremely time-critical, since we now have a teleporter. Like maybe the aliens are going to bomb a city and you have to teleport into the ship and kill all the aliens before it reaches its destination? Or maybe the aliens are injecting liquid into a fault in order to cause an earthquake, and you have to get there to stop it. Or there is an assassination attempt on some politician or military leader and you have to warp in to the middle of a government office, an aircraft carrier, or whatever in order to stop it.
How many aliens are attacking, and how big is their fleet?
And the duration of the war will be measured in weeks rather than months.
That's a rather big change which could have been mentioned in the summary. But, I like that idea, because I think it makes it easier to force difficult choices on the player. Really, it makes the game seem like one extended mission rather than a "war," so to speak.
If the game is only a few weeks long, are we still building new stuff or just capturing it? Does "research" now consist of figuring out how alien technology works instead of developing our own devices?
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When a shot is planned, all intervening cover along the planned shot path is calculated and compared.
The accuracy calculation takes the highest "stopping chance" and uses that in the hit calculation;
Wait, so if I shoot through 12 windows that each have a stopping chance of 10%, the chance that the shot is stopped is still just 10%?
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I like Mr. Gomez's idea of replacing manual crouching with modal movement. Crouching is still a "mode" of movement, so to speak, so swapping it for a cautious-movement-mode doesn't increase the total number of modes, but it certainly increases the strategic depth because a cautious-movement-mode is more versatile than a crouching mode. It's also more interesting if a modal swap alters several statistics like reflexes and vision, and if actions can be automated based on the mode (e.g., soldiers crouch next to cover in cautious mode, but not in any other mode).
I guess another soldier control paradigm would be to use binary modifiers instead of modes. For instance, select a soldier and press Q to toggle his walk speed, W to toggle auto-crouching, use E to toggle whether or not his vision points at the mouse cursor as he walks, and so forth. A mode is just a combination of these modifiers, and can be preset. But, that might make things too complicated.
Discursion, read at own risk:
I know there is a thread about crouching to compliment the other thread about leaning, but these are really just different facets of the same question, "How many operational modes should a unit have?" Should all units have the same number of modes? There are several competing criteria here:
- Control of soldiers should be streamlined and intuitive.
- There should be a number of interesting strategic decisions, a "strategic" decision being one that has a significant ratio of risk and reward and a set of lasting consequences.
- You want to paint a portrait of squad combat that bears, at minimum, Hollywood-levels of realism.
The Simultaneous Turn-Based-Strategies (Frozen Synapse, Door Kickers, Lethal Tactics) give the user a small number of movement modes and operations, all of which are versatile. Naturally, these games tend to be rather abstract, like Chess or Go. The strategy is derived from the interplay between combinations of different units operating in different modes.
On the other hand, the Alternating-Turn-Based-strategies (Old XCOM, JA2) have a far larger range of individual operations, but there is usually only one that is correct for the situation. These games tend to be more concrete representations of real life, like Settlers of Catan or Battletech, to use the analogy to board games. But they are also more tedious, and the strategy largely relies upon the abilities of an individual unit, especially in the context of the larger game, which requires you to develop units over many battles.
I think the new XCOM was such a hit because it struck the happy medium between abstraction and the amount of operations that an individual soldier can perform. The abstract, modal control scheme keeps the game fluid, but it doesn't quite lose that classic xcom feel because of the way it does everything else.
- Control of soldiers should be streamlined and intuitive.
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I'm wondering if "reflexes" could be replaced by a stat called "perceptiveness."
Reflexes versus Perception
In both systems, every unit has a maximum vision-cone that has a certain radius and angular-width, which forms a sector of a circle that "points" in the direction that the unit is facing. This maximum vision-cone is disrupted by solid objects.
In a reflex-based system (i.e., the XCOM-style), a unit's maximum vision-cone never changes. Any hostile that enters into the cone is immediately identified. A simple initiative calculation of (reflex * %TU) determines if a reaction shot can be fired (or an interrupt is generated).
In the perceptiveness-based system, The MAXIMUM vision-cone is the same as that in the reflex-based system, but the ACTUAL vision-cone is some fraction of the maximum. The ACTUAL vision-cone is recalculated for every action that takes TU, and it is ONLY recalculated ON actions that take TU. The ACTUAL vision-cone is calculated by a complicated formula with many arguments (e.g., the existing vision-cone, the type action taken, burden/strength, etc). You can imagine the vision-cone as a nerf-ball that gets compressed when the soldier moves and turns a lot, and then restores its shape if the soldier just sits there or moves slowly. The perceptiveness stat is analogous to the elasticity of the nerf-ball; a soldier with higher perceptiveness restores his vision-cone more quickly. A perceptiveness system requires the addition of a "burn time unit" button that allows vision to be restored.
Why represent vision this way?
- It sells the idea that XCOM is supposed to be slices of a live firefight. Because of the turn-based system, XCOM1 gives the player the impression that he is always shooting at stationary targets. Without moving to a simultaneous turn-based paradigm, using a dynamic vision-cone is the best way to sell this scenario.
- It's more interesting than a single value like reaction fire. It's also easier to visualize strong perceptiveness than it is to visualize strong reactions, because perceptiveness is always important.
How does reaction fire work?
There is no more initiative calculation. If unit A sees another unit B, then then unit A immediately gets to act.
Well, what if unit A and unit B see each other at the same time? This is unlikely, because vision-cones will be quite variable. But in this event, the unit with the higher perceptiveness stat acts first. If they have equal perceptiveness stat, then the mover acts first.
Okay, what if multiple adversaries see the mover.
Depends on how reaction fire is handled. If it's automatic, then the reacting units immediately use up their TUs by firing as many shots as they can. If it's a modified interrupt system, then the reacting units can either elect to take a shot, or press the "burn time unit button," which allows the moving unit to perform another action. (Note that the AI can also elect to press the "burn time unit" button as well).
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I don't think manual crouching adds much strategy to the game personally (there's rarely a reason *not* to crouch during combat), so I'd rather merge it with a system that encourages the player to interact with the battlefield more tactically.
Like a lot of other Xenonauts 1 mechanics, crouching was a relic from XCOM, from the relative accuracy benefit right down to the number of time units it took to perform the manoeuvre. The primary function of the mechanic is to improve the appearance of the game because shooting while prone looks more tactical than shooting while standing.
Not that realism is overly important, but if you consider that each turn represents a five-second slice of an actual firefight, then a cost of four time-units equates to a soldier moving from standing to prone in about a quarter of a second. It is absurd to think that a soldier could perform this action in such a short amount of time, all without losing sight of his target and immediately receiving an accuracy boost the instant his knee touches the ground. In terms of the game design of XCOM/Xnauts1, crouching isn't a strategically significant decision to make because there is no significant cost associated with the action.
Compare this to the crouching mechanic found in Frozen Synapse, a game in which crouching has more of a strategic impact. In this game, there are walls of both full- and half-height. Crouching and duck-walking behind a half-height wall will completely hide a soldier from view, whereas the soldier would have been visible over the half-height wall had he remained upright. While crouching, a soldier receives an accuracy penalty and his speed is cut in half. Crouching, therefore, has different function in either game; in Frozen Synapse, crouching and duck-walking give you the ability to completely surprise your enemy, whereas in XCOM, crouching raises your accuracy somewhat. The point is that, in Frozen Synapse, the mechanic was implemented in a way that would make it strategically significant.
No, I'm not particularly keen on adding prone to the game. I'm pretty sure that it would be optimal to go prone any turn you are not in cover, which means there's no real choice there and I'm not sure it would add anything but busywork.
What if it took a soldier an entire turn to go prone (or to crouch, for it's really the same game mechanic with a different animation), but shooting while prone yielded a 100% accuracy bonus and a large vision bonus. I think this might make the decision more strategically significant, because both the cost and the benefits of going prone would be higher relative to the situation in Xenonauts 1.
Having said this, I think that a general rule in game design is to discourage the players to assume static, defensive formations. I've dabbled in several genres of competitive online games and the worst games are those which reward static formations, as opposed to a dynamic, volatile formations. In other words, I'm saying that a single round of rock-paper-scissors is more fun than one of tic-tac-toe, even though both games are a draw when played to infinity.
In summary, I agree that the ability to crouch doesn't really add any strategy, and I'd not weep were it removed. If crouching is included, it should provide a significant cost and benefit, but there must be a way to counter an entire team of crouching soldiers.
Combat demo: first impression and thoughts about TU reserve
in Xenonauts-2 General Discussion
Posted
Here's my idea for a movement preview feature which is just an extension of what @podbelski said in the second post of the thread:
Player clicks on a soldier, hovers mouse over a distant square and presses Ctrl-Shift. The UI will show the path the soldier will take to get there like it does in X1 and a little window will appear next to the target square showing all the actions that the soldier will have time for. Now if the player CLICKS on one of these actions (while still holding down ctrl+shift), then the movement preview feature will deduct the number of TU that the selected action takes. The player can then click on a second square and in so doing create a chain of actions. This could all be represented by a phantom outline of the soldier moving along the planned route.
Essentially, this is just borrowing the turn planning mechanic from Frozen Synapse, but unlike Frozen Synapse, you're never committed to keeping the full plan for the entire turn. If the soldier spots an alien while he's walking to his destination, then the player can just abandon the plan and take some other action. This is just a feature to help the player better plan his moves, and it doesn't need to be used at all if the player doesn't hold down Ctrl+Shift (and in actual fact, it would probably only be used in hairy situations and not for hurrying all your soldiers across empty ground to get the last alien).
Regardless, I think that a flexible movement preview function like this is more useful than an XCOM-style TU reserve button because the player can throw in turning, crouching, or whatever he wants, which is something you can't really do with a TU reserve button.