Wraith_Magus

While it's complicated to explain, it's not too complicated to put into practice. We already have many things that occur over time (a functional "progress bar") in the geoscape, and this would just be changing the variables related to stat gain to have higher integer values that fill up over time on the geoscape. All the math being used is still quite simple. (Basically everything is just four-function math.) Making a training yard base upgrade would take a little more effort. It's the ramifications that are quite different - it means that combat is merely there to keep your growth rate high, not to actually give you stats. Especially with some of the extra research paths, it also means that recruits are more easily trained up, since you can bench them for long periods of time, and only occasionally give them a swing at the enemy to up their potentials, and let them grow at sub-optimal rates while the elites aren't growing that much faster than them (although still fast enough to be a dozen or so points ahead). It therefore also helps keep soldiers expendable. The most complicated portion of it would just be figuring out how fast you want characters to grow in stats, and how many battles you want them to average to achieve that rate of growth. However, it seems like, judging from how Chris posted about players taking on multiple crash sites, some sort of mechanics that helps bring power-players more in line with someone who only does just barely enough to get by is a serious concern. The problem is ultimately caused by linear rewards for effort, as far as I see it. Making diminishing rewards for greater effort brings back a balancing effect that was the goal of the "airstrike"/"donate" option.

Regarding melee weapons - I'd point out the stun baton already exists to show you what melee does in practical terms. Although a basic knife would be kind of silly, if we're dealing with plasma weapons, a plasma torch/plasmathrower makes a pretty good weapon against even armored enemies, and would be easier to make (research) than proper plasma guns that demand keeping stable magnetic fields around the plasma past the muzzle of the weapon, so you could research it earlier. As for the interceptors, themselves, I think having a pilot portrait without the accuracy bonuses would be a fair idea. We already have mission and kill counters - if the artwork wouldn't be overwhelming for the artists, why not include (gameplay-meaningless) medals for them, as well?

In general, winning in games like these involves getting a good "feel" for how the AI works, and how to exploit it. My general strategy in open fields is to use a guy in heavy armor with shields and a pistol, and push them the closest to the enemy. The enemy always targets the closest guy first. (Even if they're behind cover.) Be careful, as the lizards are aggressive, and will charge your characters. (But then, they're out of TUs, so they might not have enough left to kill you in that turn - just be sure you can kill them in that one turn window you have!) I tend to keep my guys in tight fireteams of four, with one shield/pistol/grenadier (swap pistol out of hand to throw grenades - it's cheaper), one shotgun, and either two rifles or a rifle and a sniper. (Machine guns can come in when you have 65 strength.) Move whole fireteams at a time. Always have them covering each other. Remember - shotguns with at least 20 AP get essentially automatic reaction fire, and pistols reaction fire every time for only 10 AP, so if the enemy gets up to move, you're going to get tons of shots off on them, if you spared the TUs. If one team finds trouble that's hard to approach safely, bring the other around to hit the problem from the flanks. Don't take risks. You will notice that every single alien is crouching at the end of every single turn. Do that, yourself. ALWAYS crouch at the end of the turn unless you know there's no chance of that unit coming under fire. Save 4 TUs for crouching, and maybe some left over for reaction fire, as well, and make sure you are facing the most likely angles of attack. (Turn your character with right-clicking while standing - it's only 1 TU to turn while standing, but 2 TUs while crouching.) Try to end behind cover when you can, but don't charge a whole field to do that - always have extra TUs if you're advancing. Don't end turns where some enemy can walk around a corner and blast you while you're flat footed just because you don't see anything at the end of the turn - crouch and have TUs for reaction fire, and space to hopefully avoid the blast. Keep your guys together, and they can all turn into a firing squad where they all start opening fire on a charging lizardman when he's out from cover. Alone, your guys won't have the firepower to take an alien down. You have all the turns you need. There's no bonus for a speed run, here. If you end a turn 2 tiles away from a blind corner, don't go around the corner this turn, get up to the corner, crouch facing the corner, and peek around on the next turn, with full TUs. If you don't like what you see, just duck right back behind the corner. Slow and steady wins the war. When the enemy hides behind cover like fences, keep in mind you can shoot fences by holding down CTRL - a shotgunner isn't going to hit a hiding alien behind cover, but can probably hit the cover, itself, and deal enough damage to bust a fence down with a few blasts. That gives your more accurate rifles clear line of sight. Use grenades and C4 liberally. Cram every last kilogram you can pack before TU penalties with extra grenades. You get infinite amounts. There's no cost to collateral damage to buildings. If some nasties are dug in with no good way to flank the enemy, just chuck C4 at the problem. (Try not to kill everything with explosives, though - that cuts into profits. But if you're just blowing up cover, go for it.) Flashbangs are your friend - they prevent reaction fire, and steal half their TUs for the next turn, to boot. If the enemy doesn't shoot back, you can take all day whittling away the target. Smoke grenades make the enemy forget you even exist. You can even toss them on your own characters, and have other characters spot for them. At night, I toss about 4 flares every turn - they're infinite, and only 10 TUs a toss - and you have all the turns in the world. Advance slowly, and illuminate everything. It's like craps - every time you take a chance that the enemy won't be there, you're just one die roll closer to the time you inevitably crap out. Take as few chances as possible, and rely upon the advantages you have the enemies can't match - mostly their lack of grenades and purposeful terrain destruction, as well as predictable nature.

Although I'm sure the thread has kind of moved on, I have an alternate suggestion for how to solve the problem of players doing every mission by changing how characters gain stats after battles (by making it between battles, not after battles). I put it in its own suggestion thread, but think it deserves mention here, as well, since it's really also trying to solve this problem. It could be used in conjunction with the current "airstrike" idea. Essentially, if players have to have downtime in order to gain their stats, it prevents players from wanting to send out troops after every UFO just for experience. They could build more bases, and have more missions overall, but if they don't want to screw over their troop's growth, they would need to send different sets of troops (which would be dividing out kills across more troops, rather than having a few super-troops, and cost more money, even if taking those missions lets them loot more money,) which would reduce the negative impact of having players capable of doing 50 missions more than they are "supposed to" and creating super-troops.

Although I know that savescumming in general is cheating, on the geoscape it deserves some special mention - it seems like all the UFOs spawn at the same time, basically at midnight on certain days. I tried testing it out, and you can just reload at 23:59 hours and find that every "wave" of UFOs has the same number in them for a given date, but where they appear is randomized at around that midnight on spawning dates. Hence, you can just reload until you get the kinds of UFOs you want, spawning right next to your base for easy interception. Since the geoscape is really fast to reload or do anything, it doesn't even have that tedium deterrent of the battlescape to prevent players from trying. If the game pre-calculated and saved what the next wave would be like (and a seed for what their flight plan would be - you can savescum away events like tidal disrupitons, or what direction a UFO flies in, to make them fly within range of your interceptors) at the point where the current wave spawns, you could prevent most applications of savescumming in the geoscape, since it would likely mean having to go through every mission in that wave of UFOs to get back to the point where the waves were randomized again.

In the current game, experience/stat growth is fairly gamey in nature. You load up weight to train strength. I keep a list of characters to check off, making sure everyone gets their turn to have a reaction shot before I go for the kill. It's especially bad with the Light Scouts, which are farmable practically only for their experience. To a degree, this is what the "donating"/"airstrike" idea was for, but I want to propose a different scheme for expeience overall, so that players aren't so tempted to just go into missions for character leveling sake, alone. Potential is a scheme for growth-through-use experience that aims to control player's instinct to just spam a skill to train it that I first came across in the roguelike game Elona. Potential is fairly simple in concept - it's just an experience point multiplier that goes down every time whatever the potential is tied to ranks up. At 100% potential, you gain experience normally. At 150% or 50% potential, you gain experience at 1.5 or 0.5 times normal. Each time you rank up a skill, your potential goes down. For brevity's sake, I am spoiling the details. Those interested in its technical workings click: The short of it is, you gain stats over time as you sit in base, but your potential to gain more stats goes down - making it take longer, and giving you less and less actual stat growth as you sit in base, doing nothing but drills. You get a sudden boost to your potential when you actually use your character in battle, giving them expanded potential, and letting them train faster. But that practical experience isn't going to give you actual stats, it's just making stats gained from training come faster. Hence, the way to keep soldiers going at peak efficiency isn't so much to keep them constantly in battle, but to find the proper balance between being in downtime and being in battle. This, in turn, can help with the problem of players hunting down every UFO - since taking on a UFO means taking time away from character training, then the player will eventually have enough potential that they gain no real benefit from putting characters in battle over and over, while they are actively losing their training time. Another way to keep overpowered player characters from being a problem is to make the amount of experience (since we aren't tied to a strict "one reaction shot = one point of reflexes" model, but an experience bar that fills progressively with downtime) that it takes to gain a stat increase as the stats themselves are higher values. (A rookie with 50 in Strength might take half as long to train in strength as a veteran with 100 strength... or four times as long, if you want a harsher quadratic curve.) If you make soldiers passively train, (rather than spend money on training, unless you want to make spending money be an "intensive training" option) you can also include some research options involving training - for example, after battles with specific types of aliens, you can have "sebilian noncombatant tactics" research or the like, which would also provide bonuses to the rate of experience gain, making late-game recruits train up faster than early-game recruits. So could a training yard base extension. --- Affinity is a different animal, but it relates to the problem I have with all the soldiers in my squad being basically the same for any given amount of training, with only their initial randomization of between 50 and 60 in their scores making them slightly different. Affinity is a natural predisposition towards certain stats - it means that a character with a high affinity for strength, for example, would gain strength points faster than a character with a low affinity, with or without potential. Either way, this would mean that, while starting character strength is still largely ignorable, affinity would be a major difference in what characters you recruited.

Actually, I was getting it mixed up - it's 20 more TUs for a shot from a sniper rifle, and I can fit two normal shots per turn in with an assault, while I can only get one shot per turn in with the precision rifle. That more than makes up for the 25% average damage bonus. You do occasionally get lucky and one-shot an alien, but ARs with two shots can have higher damage probability curves than one shot with a sniper rifle. However, again, this isn't really about whether or not the AR is "better" than the precision rifle, it's about how close this comparison is, in the first place. Making machine guns (which are also a part of this argument) and sniper rifles have to be planted (which wouldn't even have to take any additional animation) to be used, and just having a button or two to "bank" some TUs so that you have either an accuracy bonus the next turn, or mitigation of accuracy penalties, for the sniper rifle, would mean that the way that you use the MG or sniper rifle would change significantly from the way that you use an assault rifle. As far as "staying true" goes, we're not getting blaster bombs and psychic powers, (or if we are, they aren't the ones we had in the 94 game,) and suppression wasn't part of the original, nor was air combat where you could actually command your aircraft to do things like roll, but they're here, now. It's more re-imagining than remake, and if it makes sense for the genre and game balance, it tends to go in (or be taken out). Using a sniper rifle to mitigate cover penalties by aiming at only the parts not behind cover is certainly in the vein of things tactical shooters will do, especially since I'm mostly cribbing this off of Silent Storm. If there's some gun that previously did something similar that was taken out simply because of bugginess, then there's even more reason to think using this sort of mechanic is in-line with the concept of how a sniper rifle could and should be used. Having a "firing position" mechanic, in general, also means that characters that focus solely upon firing (without moving), regardless of weapon, can fire more rounds per turn. Having the capacity to throw more lead/energy at the enemy can compensate for the somewhat low accuracy in this game. It also makes storming an enemy that's holding its ground more hazardous, while suppression (to keep them from having so many TUs to spend firing) more valuable.

Honestly, if we're speaking of sequels, the best way to have a real sequel in the same universe after beating the aliens would be to make the Cold War turn Hot War over the leftover alien tech. Hence, make it human v. human. You could probably even let players have a choice between East and West Blocs. Nukes no longer are in play because of Star Wars-style lasers that shoot down incoming nukes, so it goes down to infantry tactics on the ground. Research would be trying to put the tech that the Xenonauts had back into regular production, so you're working with only a few lasers at the start, and have to climb up the same tech tree. You could have various "forbidden experiments" that start producing mutants/psychics to fight for variety, as well.

What's the formula for how strength modifies throwing distance, by the way? 2 + Str/8?

Actually, there was a XCom spiritual successor game (for the Game Boy Advance, no less,) that was based around the aliens winning, and setting up some sort of Logan's Run situation, where all the adult humans got taken off to get eaten by the brute-type aliens. Rebelstar: Tactical Command. You had to play through without a geoscape (it was just a string of pre-scripted missions with cutscenes to tell you what you were doing,) and no research, just salvaging your gear. Fairly OK, if a little stripped-down in features, and the RPG-like leveling system essentially meant that save-scumming to get random stats that actually helped your character builds was the only way to win. Anyway, realistically speaking, there isn't much reason to do any other kind of sequel, unless you're going for some completely different genre game, like Interceptor, where you're going spaceship to spaceship, and marines are for boarding operations, only. If you want to make a game about defending the Earth, it's more sensible to reboot it every time.

Home Base in Mexico: Fort Desperado One in Egypt: Fort Set One in Japan: Fort Gensokyo EDIT: Oh, and I put my first or second in Mexico just so I can cover three regions - I only cover the better chunk of South America with long-range scanners, but it's good enough to be able to keep South America happy by covering most of Brazil fairly well. I can't cover all of Canada, Iceland, or Alaska, but realistically, I cover everything populated that way. If I have the cash to burn, I can put an interceptor base in Alaska, later, but that's if I put the Asian base in the Philippines to cover more of Australia, rather than Kyushu. (But I don't know any sort of Philippines reference to make a fort name...)

Well, I only hand the sniper rifle over to someone with some amount of accuracy, so yes, "normal" shot accuracy with a sniper rifle hits 90-something accuracy, (assuming no cover, which still applies the cap, so no matter what accuracy you have, a shot at someone with 40% cover is stuck at around 57% accuracy, max,) and anything above that is a waste. Besides that, this is a whole load of off-topic. The game could have had different assault rifle models, some more powerful but less accurate, and some accurate but with some other flaw, but it didn't, because the game was supposed to focus just on the weapons with serious differences between them. The fact that you are arguing that when have to be at exactly the range of 24 to 28 tiles for there to be any real difference in the effectiveness of the weapon at range, with there being little difference at any other range, is somehow the "big difference" between assault rifles and precision rifles, I think you've proven just how little difference there is. The accuracy difference vanishes behind the TU costs - the extra TUs spent on aimed shots on assault rifles brings assault rifle accuracy up basically high as shots with a precision rifle when you spend equivalent TUs. Yes, there's still some difference, but along with trading the versatility of burst fire and cheaper snap shots for just having a marginal increase in damage, this is basically the equivalent of having that different model of an assault rifle that just happens to be better at long range. It's not as different as the shotgun or pistol or rocket launcher is different. The real purpose of this thread is to talk about putting in a way for sniper rifles to actually play significantly differently from an assault rifle. (As well as other weapons having a chance for a firing position, in general.) If you ever played Hammer and Sickle, you'd see just how different using a sniper rifle actually was in that game, compared to a machine gun. First of all, that game had some real stealth elements, it had a "hearing" mechanic, so you could hear the guys tromping up after you, and it had much more dangerous AI... But in general, being a sniper meant that you would crawl everywhere just to keep from being visible or noisy. You had to find someone without being found, dragging the rest of the squad as overwatch for your sniper. You lay still for several turns, building up your AP, and pumping it into steadying your aim for the shot, then you blast a sniper who was hunting for you before they could find you, then you had to move, because the enemy'd hear the sound and go investigating with a patrol that is far too large for a sniper to take on alone. You spend a long time, working around the edges, picking off the enemy one by one, until it's mostly just the sweepers left, and you set a C4 trap for them or something. I could go basically an entire mission without being seen, without my other members doing much but sitting with a machine gun pointed at the ladder or stairs to my final sniper perch. (The AI was smart enough not to climb stairs you had directly in the sights of a camping machine gunner... but not smart enough to know you were planting C4 on the floor right above where you could hear them milling around, waiting for you to come down.) It's an entirely different way of playing the game from the way that a gunner or a grenadier would play the game. Putting in the option to have a sniper that can pick off enemies from serious long range, (and that would be longer range than maps are big in this current version of Xenonauts,) because you can burn 3 or 4 turns, just steadying aim to hit a single sniper perched, waiting to catch some sight of you is a far greater difference than some piddly marginal bonus to damage that only rarely even changes how many bullets it takes to drop an enemy, or some 4-tile difference in range. The feature I'm arguing for opens up a totally different option of playstyle, the option of a 4-tile bonus to range is a triviality that does little to change how you play the game.

No, you can shoot them down. It's just that every datacore past the first one you nab is "destroyed" arbitrarily.

I payed attention to the argument, but the problem is I already dismissed that argument as insufficient justification, OR having much to do with why precision rifles shouldn't have a feature to reduce cover bonuses, or improve accuracy with spending TUs over time: It doesn't do enough damage to reduce the number of bullets it takes to down a target unless I'm shooting pistol shots at sebs, which is the only real measure of damage, and even then, that's a fairly moderate marginal difference. Accuracy is largely a wash, since, as I already said, an aimed shot from an assault rifle, which takes as many TUs as a normal shot from a precision rifle, has essentially the same near-cap accuracy. There is basically no reason to use the aimed mode of a precision rifle, since you've long since slammed into the arbitrary accuracy cap, and all the supposed bonus does nothing. So basically, you're talking about a "difference" of a marginal damage increase that doesn't actually reduce the number of bullets-to-kill on anything but a fairly lucky shot, in exchange for virtually all of the versatility of the assault rifle. In any event, the point of this thread is not that assault rifles are overpowered, which makes your argument going completely off-topic, but that precision rifles should be more unique, and have a functionality that makes their gameplay application feel more like a sniper or marksman being called in to take out a particularly nasty encampment, rather than just being the guy with the slightly more powerful rifle. Giving precision rifles the ability to reduce cover bonuses by having a sniper "focus" on the target makes the precision rifle have an actually novel application, as it means you can take out enemies behind large amounts of cover without needing to reach into the C4 satchel again. It actually changes the way you use the units. If you have the option to spend two turns just aiming at the eyeball peering out, rather than, apparently, center mass every time, and get the chance to reduce cover penalties by up to, say, 75% if you spend a full turn or two dumping TUs into precision shots, then you can make a serious change in gameplay tactics. This also applies backwards - the enemy doesn't currently toss out C4 like confetti the way that players do, but having aliens that have actual snipers that can take out a player that is camping behind cover can change gameplay. Likewise, machine guns that have to be planted, but fire more rapidly (for less TUs) once planted makes it a more static defense, rather than just being an assault rifle that fires two more bullets at a time.

Silent Storm and Hammer and Sickle had tons of WWII-era guns to "choose from", but at the same time, you were often just lifting whatever was handy off the enemy when "picking" your gun, and the game also gave a "familiarity bonus" to using the same gun, so that any marginal difference between weapons was overshadowed by losing your familiarity bonus to accuracy. (The mechanic was supposed to abstract getting used to how dinged up the barrel was, and getting used to aiming a degree to the left of the target, or something, in compensation. Effectively, just keeping the same gun gave you accuracy bonuses.) Even guns of the same make made you lose the bonus, so no point in dropping the old gun for one with more durability. It ultimately meant that there were tons of guns, but you only used two or three the whole game, and even that was because you had to leave your rifle behind when going on town missions so you could pack a concealable pistol. (Only to take a rifle from a corpse when you were past the non-combat "nothing to see here, officer" parts.) The gun you wound up married to wasn't some careful selection, but whatever was on the first guy you killed when you needed a new one, unless you happened to find one on the next one or two guys over whose marginal advantages overcame what "familiarity" you already gained on the one you just picked up. But anyway, if there's anything I consider micromanagement, it's the tiers, in the first place. If something is just plain better than every other alternative, than it's just taking away choices, not adding them. If there's no difference between plasma and laser rifles besides a marginal uptick in power and a couple day's research time, then why bother having laser rifles at all? (Throwing the notion of "rifled" lasers aside for the moment.) It's just something you manufacture a couple of to pass the time waiting for plasmas. Then, once done, you have to swap out all the same weapons for the new ones. Little in how you behave, in-game, changes. At least, if there's a "gen 1 laser" and "gen 2 laser", we might have a chance to just auto-replace the guns, taking out the micromanagement.

It doesn't seem so - a lot of games tend not to have the same vision rules for the enemy as they have for you. (As some of the exploits already in this thread suggest, the enemy has goldfish memory/no concept of object permanence, so if they can't see you, you stopped existing as far as they know. Hence, they hack LOS for the enemy so they can see you more often than they should.) It is mentioned in the Xenopedia, however, that aliens probably don't see in the same spectrum as humans do, so there may be something to that - if they only see in infra-red or something, then a flare is more blinding than illuminating. (Of course, the question can be reversed, as well - why does a flare right in front of your guy's face not quash your soldier's ability to see anything BUT the flare right in front of them?)

Although it's not massively game-breaking, you can go into the personnel screen when a dropship is in-flight, and, even though the dropship's compliment of soldiers is grayed out and supposedly unselectable, it defaults to letting you pick those soldiers and change their equipment. This means characters can swap out gear if you chain together multiple missions, reloading guns and restocking ammo and grenades, even equipping weapons or armor that were just manufactured back at base while in-flight.

A precision rifle does not have a range longer than assault rifles to really be worth mentioning, (it's only 3 or so tiles more than the assault rifle before you hit range penalties, and yes, that's trivial, especially since the additional 10 AP you spend firing can be spent just moving up another couple tiles,) and isn't really any more accurate when you fire aimed shots with the rifle, which are the two most important aspects of the weapon. The damage difference is marginal. The new features I'm talking about do significantly alter the role that a character using that weapon takes up. It's much more than a marginal change in damage, which is highly random, anyway. Besides which, the precision rifle seems capable of suppressing enemies in a single shot, itself, so saying that the assault rifle is better at suppression with burst fire is a poor argument. Again, if you have a machine gun that is more potent when planted, but less able to be used on the move, it changes how you use it - the assault rifle is a mobile suppression platform, while the heavier machine guns are less mobile defensive weapons, more practical on base defense or terror missions or watching the flank while others advance than on the advance or a breach. A precision rifle that has a feature to reduce the cover bonuses of enemies while being a more static weapon performs a vastly different function than the assault rifle, since it gives an alternative to either flanking or just lobbing C4 at cover. Yes, there are SOME minute differences in the behavior of one weapon to the other, but not nearly enough compared to what differences there should be between the two. Shotguns have a fair amount of distinction from assault rifles with their auto-burst, (although they're accurate out to strangely long distance compared to assault rifle ranges,) while pistols are weapons for grenade-throwers. Rocket launchers are obviously different from other mundane firearms. It's machine guns and precision rifles that aren't distinguished by much but marginal differences in power or a couple extra bullets being sprayed. The assault rifle behaves enough like both those weapons that there's a serious question as to why you wouldn't just use the assault rifle for both those roles.

Well, technically, they had to take full-auto mode off of the early M16s because almost the only way soldiers of the time were using the weapon was wasting whole clips for suppression. Considering we're often fighting at ranges where it's possible as an alternative to shooting from a distance, we could instead just run up and punch the enemy, burst fire should be accurate enough. (I often find when using shotguns that it's cheaper, TU-wise, to just run five steps closer and fire two snap shots from near-point-blank than it is to fire two aimed shots from further away.) Especially for reaction fire, it seems odd that we go with one shot, rather than a burst. The unusually high TU cost of (non-aimed) burst fire, when it takes barely more effort on the part of the soldier is a little unusual. But anyway, yes, assault rifles really should have some slightly-controlled aimed burst fire (as should machine guns put down on a bipod) while precision rifles need to be precise out to a noticeably greater range than an M16 to be worth the name. A sniper rifle takes twice as many TUs to fire a basic shot as an assault rifle, and both weapons "cost" nothing, so the question becomes what's the marginal advantage of a precision rifle, if it behaves just like an assault rifle in single-shot mode, but costs more TUs, can't be used well after moving (forcing taking a pistol), lacks that burst capability at close range, and you never really fight at the tiny difference in range between where assault rifles are suffering range penalties, but precision rifles don't. Unless we get some sort of "scope view" button that lets us see further in daylight in a specific direction, having the capacity to shoot at the head peeking out over a chest-high wall without suffering a flat 30% maximum accuracy because of intervening obstacles would be the best way to really distinguish why the precision rifle is meant for slow, methodical shots from a static position.

Speaking of how little difference there is between weapons, I have to say it's a little silly that assault rifles are basically treated like precision rifles most of the time - the range difference isn't all that significant, you basically never want to use burst fire, (which should be the default mode of using an assault rifle, not the last resort,) and the accuracy differences between "aimed" assault rifle shots and "normal" precision rifle shots are trivial. (They also cost the same in TUs.) There is currently no reason I can see to use "aimed" precision rifle shots, as aimed shots don't mitigate penalties from partial cover, meaning that the difference is often 94% accuracy versus 95% accuracy with no cover, and something like 44% accuracy versus 44% accuracy with cover. Unless there's some sort of damage bonus I don't know about, you're burning 10 AP for nothing. I don't see this as "fiddly", I see it as necessary to make the weapon really make sense.

It would be more easily justifiable if there were either "generations" of the same technology, or else lower-grade versions of the same tech. That is, like with how modern CPUs have multiple ratings for any given generation, based upon taking the chips that were manufactured well enough to withstand the highest specs and selling those as the best-grade chips, and then selling the ones that were defective at high heat, but capable of running at lower clock speeds as the econo-bin version. Not to kick up a gun debate or anything, but weapons like an AK-47 are most notable simply for being cheap and readily available compared to weapons that require more high-precision manufacturing. Alternately, it would be like giving the latest rifles to your elite troops, letting the slightly older, retrofitted versions go to the regulars, and the provisional troops and reserves can have the old M1 Garands you have in surplus. Likewise, we have generations of aircraft and list modern aircraft by what generation they are after jets were inventied. The US was using the F4 Phantom from 1960 straight to the First Gulf War. Around the world, many other nations still use Phantoms, even after being long obsolete by US standards. --- Personally, I rather dislike the notion of "tiers", (at least, on their own,) since they just remove the idea of having a broader choice. Choosing between having a shotgun or a rifle is a real choice. Choosing between plasma pistols and regular pistols is obvious - why would I want a pistol that deals single-digit damage to Sebs when I could have one that rips through them like a hot plasma through butter made of melted body fat? I'd rather see the differences be with plasma that has short range to laser's long range but fast battery depletion to ballistics low damage, and then, if we must have tiers, make them "generation 1 lasers" and "generation 2 lasers".

Anyway, I do have another style of entry that works well for me, although it depends on having a little room to set my guys up. Rather than have my guys around a corner, I set them up facing directly at the door. Two lines, first line crouching, second line right behind them, firing over their shoulders. I use two guys with shields with no guns equipped - one opens the door, the other stands slightly to the side, and chucks flashbangs. The grenade-tosser is ironically the one most likely to take fire. Once you've got the enemy stunned, pull the door-opener back, and have your snipers and riflemen in the firing squad hose the area down with lead (or light or superheated ions as the case may be). The advantage of this is that you don't burn TUs on repositioning or tripping all over your own guy's feet. Unless it's a scout or something, you might not have an angle on the whole contents of the UFO, but that's fine - they won't have an angle on you, either in that case, and if you save some TUs for reaction fire, and keep the (heavily armored) shield guys closer to the enemy, they target them, first, if the enemies charge you. (Of course, if you pull your shield guys back far enough, then anyone not in the firing squad can be on the sides with shotguns, waiting.)

Well, making a hefty penalty to limber/unlimber a MG would turn it into a defensive weapon for area denial, and make it more distinct as a weapon - not exactly negative traits. Especially when we start having more aggressive AI, where you sometimes need to just hold ground, rather than take it, a heavier MG (possibly even with a distinction of LMG for being more man-portable,) would be an attractive option. It changes the way you think about using those weapons if you have to hump an MG around without being able to fire it, take a full turn to deploy it, and only be usable from a crouch/"prone"/"leaning" or some other abstraction representing you have the bipod down, but then, once deployed, is capable of hosing an area liberally, you start actually getting at the actual purpose of a machine gun. If anything, I don't see it being any more finicky than having to manually path what steps my units take because of sub-optimal choices by the pathfinding.

To talk about it from a different angle, though... If one of the "problems" that this game faces, currently, according to the dev, is that players are expected to only get in 30-40 missions, total, and too many players are taking on every single UFO they can possibly catch, then wouldn't a solution be to just make it so that it's possible to have more troops, but that they get sick, sleep, take leave, or something else, so that you never can rely on every soldier being in top condition round-the-clock? In real life, if a job takes 4 people, you hire 5, because at least one will average being sick or something. If you want to work round-the-clock, you hire 15. If the "problem" is ultra-elite troops and too much money if you want to have round-the-clock UFO hunting, then just make players split that experience among more troops, and that cash among their salaries.

Nope, I just use hyperbole for comedic effect. I do run my armies on leftover ham sandwiches, though. I make REALLY good sandwiches. Although I do have to wonder why we have to build whole new bases to get radar coverage, instead of just having the Pentagon call you and tell you that there's a UFO flying over Maine at the moment. It's a little silly to have people complaining and cutting your funding early in the game that 50 people died in an "unusual disruption of communications" (presumably due to aliens interrupting a football match, causing riots that killed all those people,) when there's absolutely no chance you could have stopped it, due to being only one base on the other side of the world from the problem and having no radar coverage or fighter range. It's not that it couldn't be made into a good game - you could have some sort of funding and diplomacy concept where you have to haggle for access to specific resources that the rest of the world can put at your disposal, instead of just having to explicitly build everything yourself. It's just something more advanced and more abstract than what micromanagement-heavy X-Com did.