What happened to the cover indicators?

[Comrade]

Seriously what happened to them? In X1 they were extremely useful for determining what will protect you and what won't. Why haven't they been added to X2 yet?

[maxm222]

Good question, although check out the discussions about different aspects of cover by searching on "cover" or "cover indicators." 

What I would like to see is: when you first click on the location you are thinking about moving to, you see the % of cover (which you can otherwise only see if you try to shoot at something).  This would give one some way of estimating the effectiveness of possible cover, including whether the cover blocks 100% of your LOS--which can be an unpleasant surprise.

This does bring up a problem, though.  How does the game know which direction you're interested in knowing about?  Perhaps after the first click, you could do an additional input (mouse click or key press) for directions?  Or, the code could look at where the visible enemy units are, and use that direction--but what if there are enemies in two (or three, or four) different directions?

[Chris]

Hmm, that's a very good question. A long time ago we had an X-Com style cover marker system, but we removed it (and it'd struggle with diagonals anyway). So I guess we've just forgotten about it.

I'll create a task to add them in.

[maxm222]

Thanks!

[Bluddy]

Jagged Alliance 2 had 2 keys that were added in one of the later patches. One of them provided an overlay that colored the map from green to red showing cover given known enemy locations. The other I believe colored the map green to red based on a specific cursor position, showing you LOS to potential target locations. I could be a little wrong on the specifics, but that's the gist of it. Translating this to the Firaxcom system, you'd want the cover indicator to possibly have more gradations: maybe 4 levels of cover? And you'd want to indicate, based on movement to the current cursor position, what the LOS is to each enemy, perhaps with icons there as well.

[terbro10]

A move one square and shoot action using the equivalent action points as a manual attempt, but performed seemlessly.

 

I am unaware of how the game plays, as I am waiting on the full release to appear down at GOG, but presuming the character has a skill that improves such as agility, this could reduce the ap's of such an action. Ergo when you hover the mouse over an alien, with the move-to-shoot initiated, the best square to take the shot and the odds will highlight on the map, according to the characters skill.

 

Gives a little breathing space for moving somewhere that wasn't quite as your perspective initially.

Edited January 29, 2020 by terbro10
elaboration.