Reaction fire after alien dies

[SoftwareSimian]

This could be intentional and a side effect of the sequential animation, but I noticed I had one alien surrounded by 4 soldiers, and the first soldier reaction shot killed the alien. But then the other 3 soldiers also took reaction shots at the now-dead alien.

I suppose the soldiers really took reaction shots near-simultaneously and wouldn't have known that another soldier's shot killed the alien until after they shot, but the way it's animated it looks kind of odd.

[Ishantil]

Sounds odd. I have not noticed this behavior, but I will keep an eye out for it.

[Xintrosi]

I have noticed this happen multiple times. It's very annoying when I know more than one alien is incoming but everyone blows saved TU on the first (already dead) enemy.

[smoitessier]

Sounds normal to me, an alien bursts out of a door and gets filled with lead, the next alien to pop up will still trigger a reaction fire if your men still have TUs.

[Ol' Stinky]

I guess having the death sounds/animation happen after all queued reaction shots have been fired would solve it without changing any of the gameplay. Although I wouldn't really mind it if there was a one reaction shot per trigger action system in play. I guess that would also make shield scouting inside alien bases a bit more reliable as well.

Edit: Whoops, I mean only one unit can reaction fire to a trigger: any other reaction fire would have to wait for another trigger, the rest would be saved and fired on another trigger. So soldier A moves into sight of aliens X and Y. Both X and Y pass the reaction fire test, but only one of them gets to take the reaction shot until A moves/shoots/etc.

Edited September 7, 2013 by Ol' Stinky

[Leonidas]

i have noticed this many times and it happens for the aliens too.

I'm guessing the reaction shots get evaluated and queued and then executed without ever re-evaluating between one another - i.e. first shot kills the alien, the rest still performs reaction fire.

[Max_Caine]

There is another reason why squaddies might shoot at a now-dead alien other than the queing up of reaction shots. However, we need to test the hypothesis that reaction shots are queued up. There's a little scout I'm going to take on. I'll post the results as soon as I can, because I have a strong suspicion that the underlying reason is not the one that people are suggesting.