[V.6..25] - Ground Combat issues with smoke

[Gevudan]

Hello, a developer suggested I upload a save and video of cleaner units shooting through smoke as apparently that's not intended, I thought it was just a bad roll. I managed to recreate the issue, except with reaction fire. I assume that cleaner units should not be able to fire through smoke and intervening objects to hit too often.

auto_groundcombat_turn_4_start-7.json user_day_1_atlas_base_manual_save-1.json

Edited November 29, 2025 by Gevudan
To better format post

[Gevudan]

Still like before it just seems a bad roll, if there's even 1% chance of a hit, I do expect a hit sometimes. But it does happen a bit more often than I like, but that could just be bad luck.

[Chris]

On 11/29/2025 at 9:24 AM, Gevudan said:

Hello, a developer suggested I upload a save and video of cleaner units shooting through smoke as apparently that's not intended, I thought it was just a bad roll. I managed to recreate the issue, except with reaction fire. I assume that cleaner units should not be able to fire through smoke and intervening objects to hit too often.

 

auto_groundcombat_turn_4_start-7.json 2.23 MB · 1 download user_day_1_atlas_base_manual_save-1.json 2.23 MB · 1 download

Thanks. We'll take a look. I think there's a minimum accuracy threshold for the AI units to take a reaction fire shot, so I think something might be going wrong here. That much smoke should be making it impossible.

[Chris]

On 11/29/2025 at 9:40 AM, Gevudan said:

Still like before it just seems a bad roll, if there's even 1% chance of a hit, I do expect a hit sometimes. But it does happen a bit more often than I like, but that could just be bad luck.

So the shot hitting isn't actually a bug - the enemies have a 10%-15% hit chance when shooting into that smoke, so it's not completely ridiculous that they could score a hit on a unit moving in the smoke. It's just fairly unlikely.

However the one thing this has exposed is that the AI is using different thresholds for shooting at units during overwatch fire than for normal shots. It won't normally take a shot unless it has at least a 30% chance of hitting, but it'll overwatch fire at a 5% hit chance. So I think we need to unify those and make the aliens less likely to overwatch - as they will occasionally roll highly and score a lucky hit.

[Gevudan]

Hi, so the issue is that the AI should be more selective with their shots >30% both for reaction fire and normal fire?

 

This is the original post that inspired me to make this report, unfortunately I was on iron man so I had no save. So the issue is that the cleaner soldier should not have tried to take such a low percentage shot.  I don’t think the cleaner had 30% for this shot either so the threshold issue may apply to regular shots taken during enemy turn too. I’ll try to see if I can recreate this issue not just during reaction fire but during the enemy turn. 

 

[Gevudan]

Managed to recreate, cleaner soldier burst fire through full cloud of smoke on commander difficulty, luckily the AI did not roll high this time, but it does seem that the AI will take whatever shots it can even if it has a real low chance of working, I have had this work in my favor where the AI will shoot through their companions from far away and they end up killing a couple of their own guys.  

bug_report_2025-12-05-23h05_gc_6.26.0_user_f11_0.zip

[Chris]

On 12/6/2025 at 4:08 AM, Gevudan said:

Managed to recreate, cleaner soldier burst fire through full cloud of smoke on commander difficulty, luckily the AI did not roll high this time, but it does seem that the AI will take whatever shots it can even if it has a real low chance of working, I have had this work in my favor where the AI will shoot through their companions from far away and they end up killing a couple of their own guys.  

bug_report_2025-12-05-23h05_gc_6.26.0_user_f11_0.zip 46.86 MB · 0 downloads

Yeah, that's the problem - it'll be fixed in Milestone 7. But yes, the AI should use the 30% threshold for all shots - at the moment it's not using it correctly for overwatch shots.

There's also a bug with the smoke where if you're shooting into smoke (but not out of it) then it counts one less smoke tile as being part of the shot path calculation than it should, which is probably also feeding into this issue. That'll also be fixed in Milestone 7.