Squad Shared Sight Issues

[Hovis]

So this is one of the major mechanics that strikes me as unbalanced in the current game: the combination of squad sight and persistent LOS (i.e. a unit can look at a location and move away, but that location still stays "revealed" for the rest of the turn).

This means you can game the system pretty effectively by sending your soldier into range of an alien to spot him, then run him out of fire range to keep him safe but still pick the alien off with your snipers. That only leaves you vulnerable to reaction fire during the entire process.

It also leads to a problem where if an alien spots your team, they will all be able to shoot at you even if you then kill that alien. It's frustrating because there's nothing you can do about it.

I'm therefore thinking we'll make these two changes:

• LOS is no longer persistent throughout the turn. The only areas revealed are those that are directly in the LOS of a unit at that particular time. Therefore if a unit is killed or turns away from an area, it is no longer revealed.

• If a unit is suppressed, it loses all LOS.

This does more to address the second issue, as if you come across an alien in your turn you either need to kill or suppress it or you'll possibly get enemy squad fire at you during the alien turn (or retreat out of range).

It only partially addresses point 1, but unfortunately that's always going to be a valid tactic so long as we don't decide to force to utilize their units sequentially without letting them swop between them - and I've no plans to change that.

Thoughts and comments welcome.

I think the squad sight is fair and works okay. It doesn't -feel- particularly realistic, but I think it actually sort of is.

Imagine a soldier is bimbling along with their squad, and they see an alien- What do they do? Well if they are an experienced soldier (which they are in Xenonauts) they'll call the contact, which does not mean shouting CONTACT!!! and using a minigun to annihilate a large area of jungle, it means giving a very concise yet precise verbal description of the enemy. Direction, range, type of contact. The other soldiers will be able to locate the target based on that call, and then be able to shoot it.

I think that though this grants the ability often to shoot beyond standard range, this is okay, because it's directed fire, the spotter has pointed out the target to the squad and they are seeking it out, which would account for a long target acquisition range.

Gaming the system sounds cheap and brutal, but it's perfectly viable and sure, it's ruthless as all hell to expose your point man to reaction fire in order to get eyes on an Bug Eyed Monster, but it's perfectly viable to use somebody as bait to flush out a shooter (a friend of mine who served in Afghanistan actually had his platoon used in this capacity). One tactic that I think is perfectly reasonable for example is to have a gun group, maybe a sniper and MG or two MGs, sitting behind the line to pour fire down onto enemies who are spotted by the scout element. Sure the gunners are largely safe, but that's sort of the point of that particular plan (and it tends to carry a risk of friendly fire).

No reason to think the aliens can't do the same sort of thing.

From a game balance point of view I think squad sight and that sort of collective effort is important as it really brings a sense of group and squad tactics into play. It's like chess, you use all the pieces together.

[ventuswings]

@Hovis

I think it's not the problem with the squad sight, it's just that having seen tile once provides complete information for free for rest of the turn. You can still move your spotter and blind-fire at where you saw the alien was standing at, but you really shouldn't be expected to know result for that action without having someone take a look at it.

I'm much more impartial about second point though, suppression already feels too strong...

Edited December 2, 2013 by ventuswings

[StK]

I actually don't think its that big of a deal.

Because if I try to figure out how to implement logic into sightlanes in round based combat where as in a round everything should kinda happen simultansiously, I'm afraid I might strain something in my brain if I try to figure out who sees what at a particular timestamp.

I'm not at all sure if it's understandable to you where i think the problem with applying logic to it lies, but I don't think I can make it any clearer.

From a gameplay aspect.. hmm it helps the player but also lets him get around the very rigid cover system and that his comrades cant go prone to get out of the way for the shot.

If you think it's very broken, well fiddle with it. I don't think it's that bad and am not sure if it needs messing with.

edit: Why was this thread brought back from the dead in the first place? Did someone mention something about changing how LoS works right now?

Edited December 3, 2013 by StK

[StellarRat]

I agree with StK. In real combat once you actually spot something (by far the hardest part) it's very difficult to lose it again unless it moves into new cover and usually further back. We used to say, "he who sees wins". That's because modern weapons are so deadly that if you see the enemy first he's likely to be killed before he can hurt you. Once someone reports an enemy everyone will be looking there. It's hard to hide from 10 sets of eyeballs once they know where and what to look for.

[Brochacho]

Squad sight is a pretty realistic abstraction of how modern infantry combat actually works -- what's unrealistic is the concept of a unit having such an arbitrarily limited sight range. That said, the sight range limitation is in place for gameplay/tension reasons, not realism.

[StellarRat]

Squad sight is a pretty realistic abstraction of how modern infantry combat actually works -- what's unrealistic is the concept of a unit having such an arbitrarily limited sight range. That said, the sight range limitation is in place for gameplay/tension reasons, not realism.

The sight range thing is also because the maps can't be made large enough to give proper scale to the weapon ranges and sighting distances. To truly do it "right" the maps would be huge and the Xenonauts would look like little dots on the map. Battlefront's Combat Mission series does allow you to zoom out to proper scale and even tanks look like ants on the map.

[ventuswings]

We're planning to give this a test once both Aaron and I are back in the office. Likely we'll put it in one of the experimental builds so you guys can test it for yourselves.

Hello, I was wondering when this new sight system might be implemented. Do you plan to include it by the Christmas build?