Teiwaz

In just about every XCom-like game I've played, when you create a new base, it has a preset default layout. A terrible preset default layout with alien accessible hangars scattered all over the place, connected to everything else without chokepoints. If you want to specify a layout for defensive or aesthetic purposes, you're forced to destroy and rebuild rooms, which seems silly if you just built the base. It'd be nice if we had the option to define our own base layouts right off the bat. (Just give us the default rooms with no cost or building time.) Also, it would be nice if we could specify connections between facilities within the base, rather than having them automatically connect to all adjacent rooms. All rooms would still have to be connected, of course.

The 2 things this would miss are equipment-based specialties (like a medic, or an engineer), as well as in non-combat screens, such as the personnel or soldier windows. When I'm assigning guys to a transport, or setting their initial roles based on stats in the personnel window, I want to be able to see the squad makeup to make sure I have everyone I need. This would require this info to be visible pretty much everywhere you see the soldier's name.

Yeah, "stopping value" sounds right. (I can't even remember where I read that.) Yes, the "d&d4" system means you can use a corner as "cover" any distance away form it. I don't think this is a problem, however, and is quite realistic. If you can only see a fraction of my body around a corner, it doesn't matter how far away I am from the corner, it's still doing its job of making me harder to hit. The advantage of being closer to the cover object than your opponent is that you have to move less and your opponent has to move more in order to alter the amount of each of you that is more or less concealed. The other advantage of this method for calculating corner cover, rather than creating a special exception case (where people can trace LOS from an adjacent tile, but only when they're in cover) is that it covers a number of edge cases very well. For example, imagine a doorway in the side of a hallway. With this system, you could move up to the doorway (but not all the way into the hallway) and scope out the hall with the safety of cover from the door by looking both ways, rather than the current system, where you have to boldly leap all the way out into the hallway before you can see down it. There are also a lot of realistic tactical applications - the first soldier could stop at a corner and provide covering fire from protection while the rest of the team moves ahead. Flanking, pincer actions, and making multiple simultaneous entries into a room becomes more important, as suddenly there's more available cover which can be defeated by getting around to the side of it. (As the threshold for exposing a third "corner" of a tile to reduce the cover bonus is a less drastic move than that required to avoid shooting through the facing edge of the tile, as is the case when trying to deny waist-high wall sorts of cover.) It turns the "all or nothing" approach of regular tile based LOS checks - where either you're completely exposed, or not exposed at all - and introduces a middle-ground where you can peek around corners, and be partially exposed to attackers and so be more difficult to hit but not impossible to hit, which is really the essence of cover. And it just makes more sense to someone who isn't intimately familiar with the mechanics underlying the game. (If I'm partially concealed, I just expect to be harder to hit. That's not the case, right now.)

D&D 4th edition traces line of sight to and from the corners of tiles, rather than to and from the center of tiles, which covers this circumstance nicely. (The algorithm is essentially that you pick a corner of the tile you're in, and you trace LOS to the corners of all the tiles the enemy is in. If you have LOS to a single corner, you have LOS, but unless you have LOS to all corners, the enemy benefits from cover.) In Xenonauts, this could be represented by modifying the... I forget what it's called... base hit chance of the target? (i.e. the value that's 60% for crouching troops and 100% for standing. Multiply that by number of exposed corners / total number of corners.) I find not being able to effectively use corners as cover extremely counter-intuitive, and having my fragile soldiers run around corners like idiots (facing the wrong way, no less!) rather than pie corners, or use doorways as cover, very frustrating. I'd be concerned about leaving something like this all the way until beta, as it's a low-level technical/mechanical change, it would have a substantial effect on balance (the amount of available cover in an area would easily triple), AI would have to be updated to understand that when attempting to move to establish line of sight to a unit, it works to get line of sight to an adjacent tile, but would be *better* to establish line of sight to a different tile, etc. Lots of knock-on effects. I'd be surprised if something like this would be feasible as late as beta, which would be very unfortunate, I think.

Most squad-based tactical games in the vein of x-com allow the player to rename their soldiers. 90% of the time, players use this feature to make notes about their soldier's capabilities or role in the squad, leading to teams with stupid names like "Bob Machinegunner" or "Bill Sniper" or "James Medic." Or even worse, "Shotgun 2." I've always hated this. Could we just have a separate field, which is displayed with the name (like their rank), which allows us to enter a comment without renaming the soldier? Or even just provide a dropdown of preset roles we could assign our soldiers? This could also be used to allow us to sort our soldiers when equipping them, allowing for easier management of soldiers within standardized roles. Even better, it could allow us to define default loadouts to soldier roles in order to reduce some of the micromanagement required when equipping squads before a mission.

Xenonauts does some neat stuff in terms of allowing soldiers to take cover behind waist-high walls. However, a more common circumstance is taking cover at a corner, like the corner of a building, or at a doorway. I always have a heck of a time with tile-based squad games like this positioning my troops in cover at these corners - either they are behind the corner, and so can't be shot at all but can't see either, or they're standing in the open in order to see, but don't benefit from cover at all. Cover at corners is critical in indoor spaces, and in most maps tends to be substantially more available than waist-high walls. I suggest implementing a system similar to the mid-level cover system to allow soldiers to take cover behind corners, but still be able to see, shoot, and be seen and shot in return. For example: #| 3 |###| |###| |###| |[u]##[/u]#| 1 2#| In the current system, soldier 1 can see and shoot at alien 3, but is completely exposed. Soldier 2 is completely obscured to alien 3, but can neither see or shoot at him. Soldier 2 *should* be able to take cover at his present position, but lean out around the corner to see alien 3 and shoot at him while only minimally exposing himself to return fire.