Alternate ways of dispelling the fog of war?

[Jebediah]

I was originally going to post about how the lines of sight are way too short in daytime missions, and need to be expanded, but I realize now that this is likely something the dev team is trying to refine on account of this being beta. I'll just leave it at pointing out the balance is a bit too far on the low side and should be scaled up in the future.

The real reason for this thread is that in a combat situation, there's more ways to find out what's fifty yards that way than just sending a dude running twenty yards that way.

The first thing could be an actual binoculars equipment piece in-game, that uses 40 or so TUs like a sniper rifle, and requires the unit remain stationary, but doubles the unit's line of sight when used. It always seems so strange to me that snipers have very long ranges in-game, but can never acquire targets on their own that are far enough away to justify having such a long-range weapon itself. Giving a sniper a spotter who can see out far enough to make the sniper useful would be a nice, easy way to remedy this.

In addition, perhaps another thing could be to give the player the option of setting down the helicopter immediately upon arriving at the mission site, or having it do one or two recon passes over the area before touching down. It would be a tradeoff between gaining advance knowledge about certain things on the battlefield, like perhaps having the entire map visible for the first turn, or at least a more-or-less accurate list of enemy assets, but at the cost of increased interception risk, something every player has already experienced at least once and absolutely loathes risking. It just seems odd to me that our troopers get essentially a bird's eye view of the entire battlefield since they reach it in a helicopter, but then don't necessarily even know which general direction the UFO crash is in judging by the sheer blackness of the map.

Another possibility might be along the lines of the AN/PVS-2 starlight scope of the Vietnam era, the historically accurate forerunner to modern night-vision optics. Notice just how freaking huge the thing is. Also, it weighs about the same, sometimes slightly more than, the rifle it's mounted on. It's difficult to use, gives terrible resolution images, affects the accuracy of any weapon tremendously by putting the weight equivalent of another rifle on top of the rifle, and has many other drawbacks that could and would be implemented as balancing measures.

Its one advantage: You can see in the dark. It would take, say, four TUs to even raise the damn thing to your face, but once a unit was looking through it, it would be almost comparable to daytime ops in terms of view distance.

All just suggestions...my personal development philosophy is to imagine a game with 1000% of its finished content and eliminate stuff from there, as reflected in pretty much all my suggestions. Take 'em as you will, but if at the end of the day one of them makes it in there I suppose the 1000% system worked.

[Muskrat]

The whole "I don't know where the UFO is" bother's me a lot. What military strike team goes in blind on an op? They should know the layout of the land, where their objective is, etc.

I'd rather the "fog" be a "fog". You can see the whole map, but it's grayed out until it's in sight. At which point any changes are revealed (doors open/closed, cover blown up, aliens hiding, etc). It lets you make better tactical choices, and reflects reality a bit better.

I know some people like the whole "map is a mystery" thing, but I hate GUESSING which way to make my advance. I'm a professional military organization but with my jets flying over head, shooting these things down, and my soldier's arriving by chopper I still don't have the intel of where the crash site is? I can't see that building that's 5ft beyond my "sight range"? It makes no sense.

[soni123]

Thanks for the great discussion and highlighting the relevant issue. But I think the entire thing is not mysterious as the evidence are coming into broadsheet and as an Essay Writer  I can say that people will get to know about it soon. 

Edited April 13, 2022 by soni123