[GC] Orientation when TUs are depleted

[Rodmar18]

Perhaps one aspect of ground combat's gameplay could benefit from a little discussion. In Xenonauts-1, when you order a move that can't be terminated on this turn (path indicator ending in red), your soldier ends his/her turn facing the last direction headed before movement's end. Even if this is not really your choice because the soldier was about to change direction (if more TUs left). Having ran out of TUs, the soldier can't of course be used for reaction fire, but he/she could have been useful to watch enemy movement in the direction of next move (simply because the enemy is coming from this direction. The player has to realize that the scheduled move won't end on this turn, then stop the soldier before last hex to get enough TUs to reoriente and crouch. There is a TU reserve to crouch, and not to reoriente.

Some micromanagement could perhaps be avoided if, each time that a scheduled move is truncated just before a turn (as per the original path indicator), the movement engine anticipates, stops movement and let TUs enough to (manually) reoriente the character in the scheduled new direction (that is expected to be headed on the next turn).

On the little sketch below, a soldier is ordered to turn around a corner (X). Possible movement is (o) and postponed movement (red path indicator) is (.).

On the first two situations, if order is confirmed, the soldier either stops before turning (has a last move before turning), or just after turning, facing to the direction of interest. On the last situation, movement is stopped with the soldier facing a direction that can be of no interest and there's no TU left to reoriente. The player has to manually order situation 1 after having noticed situation 3. Believe me, I found this situation quite often during my play.

. . .  .                  . . o o              . . .  o 

XXX o                 XXX o               XXX o

XXX o                 XXX o               XXX o

XXX o                 XXX o               XXX o

XXX o                 XXX o               XXX o

Edited August 20, 2018 by Rodmar18

[Chris]

Sorry, your diagrams aren’t aligning correctly on my phone. I’m not quite clear what the issue is here though - are you saying that a soldier with an interrupted move will not have their movement terminated as soon as they take their last step (so soldiers can waste TU doing “useless” turns trying to orientate themselves towards a tile they don’t have enough TU to move into?)

[Rodmar18]

I should have taken an in-game screenshot but I have not currently the game at hand. You figured the case anyways: how orienting a soldier when a move is interrupted because of not having TUs enough. And I was not clear enough, as I unfortunately mixed two ideas.

On 8/20/2018 at 12:24 PM, Rodmar18 said:

The player has to realize that the scheduled move won't end on this turn, then stop the soldier before last hex to get enough TUs to reoriente and crouch. There is a TU reserve to crouch, and not to reoriente.

Some micromanagement could perhaps be avoided if, each time that a scheduled move is truncated just before a turn (as per the original path indicator), the movement engine anticipates, stops movement and let TUs enough to (manually) reoriente the character in the scheduled new direction (that is expected to be headed on the next turn).

Let me try again.

• Xenonauts-1: The soldier steps forward a last time then freezes. He has got possibly 1 or more TUs left (plus 3 if reservation for crouching is active). Shall the ordered move be a straight trajectory, this is not a concern as he already faces next heading. However, if next scheduled move implies an immediate direction change, I found several times that it was convenient to manually reoriente the soldier towards this future direction (to enlarge my vision domain) instead of letting him as the game let him.

1. Proposal 1: Whenever an actor is stopped just one step before turning, and there is TUs enough to turn (and not to both turn and move), at least partially (in case it's 1 TU per 45° turn), then prepare the turn and oriente the actor as much as possible towards next heading. Spare the player this micromanagement. This feature could be a setting option.
2. Proposal 2: Whenever an actor is about to step forward a last time before turning and running out of TUs, then stop him. Let the player decide what to do. That would stop a soldier before a corner, one step before proposal 1 (in which case he stops at the corner and turns on the spot). I'm not sure about the usefulness of this second proposal and I list it only because it's what I happened to suggest in my previous post.

[Chris]

I don’t think proposal 2 is a good idea. Proposal 1, possibly - I think that’s just something we’d need to experiment with.

I think it might introduce a problem where the soldier turns to make a step he cannot take, and then doesn’t have any TU left to re-orientate to a more useful direction. Not sure whether that situation is worse than the one you are currently experiencing though; we’d need to test it.

[Ruggerman]

Can't there be a TU bank, as there is for shooting, and over-watch, a preset notch on the time units register, for this type of activity.