That makes zero sense. Why on earth would any reasonable person just stand idly and shoot into a rock, a wall or a closed window instead of leaning slightly to either side of it and firing or breaking/opening the window and firing?
Yes, I prefer the cover system in Silent Storm to the streamlined, simplistic one in nuCom but I quite like the fact that your troops will actually act like rational human beings and lean out of cover to fire or lean around the corners to check for enemies.
I much prefer the organic systems in, well, pretty much every game that attempts to model trajectories. Shooting a wall in front of you is just the soldiers doing as they are told, you can't get rid of that without implementing player-faction automation. If you cannot shoot the wall in front of you with a rocket then you cannot shoot the wall in front of you with a shotgun or power-sword to make a neat hole to walk through. Most cover systems are very unrealistic and fundamentally compromise the gameplay. You end up surviving ludicrous situations because you run around from cover to cover, while sensible tactics such as lying down in the open if no cover is near at hand, or offering suppressive counter-fire promptly rather than all carefully getting behind carefully prepared(but usually flimsy, a car door won't stop much of anything and is nicely just the right size that everyone can tell exactly where you are...) while the opposition politely waits for you to do so... Really, the fundamental problem with "cover systems" is that they take over the game and are not sensible enough to allow immersion. I mean, they are great in puzzle games, Invisible Inc. is a great example of this, it is a puzzle game and the Ycom cover system is absolutely wonderful there, but in a game that is not a puzzle-game, it is a puzzle-game element in the middle of a game that it just doesn't fit into.
X-com would have benefited from a half-step feature that could half expose an agent and let them shoot around a corner, it would have been handy, but it is much better to have to deal with obstacles that are obviously obstacles, and to have the freedom to expose agents to shoot as they would actually need to do, then to have the opposite which is a dodgy cover system that lets someone largely ignore you if you happen to be one step short of ninety degrees, but if you reach the magic number, then suddenly you get automatic critical shots... And that is the most annoying thing to me, I have no idea why, but somehow this just catches in my craw, When you are behind cover, it is pretty much just vitals that are exposed, the critical chance is the one thing that cover shouldn't reduce, if anything, cover should make almost all hits be critical ones, either you lose a hand or a head, either way you are likely to be looking at a career change...
But basically, it is just extremely gamey, which tends to throw off the smooth flow and immersion of the game, because you need to stop and make sure that you conform to very specific and arbitrary rules.
Once again, if they didn't have a free move they'd just get utterly massacred.
You ever think thats because the devs are doing something wrong? I mean, if you're just gonna have the enemies spawn when you see them, then why not just have them spawn in cover? Boom, no more need for a free movement turn.
As per the ambush thing, isn't that kind of the point? You only get one ambush, shouldn't it be more powerful than killing ONE enemy? I mean, they pit you against 15-20 guys on a mission, killing one of them is actually less effective than most normal turns.
I said at least one guy. If there wasn't any 'dive to cover' thing then it would be like that every time you encountered an enemy patrol.
And I prefer this system to 'spawn in cover' because 1) The difference isn't existent, really. The difference is literally 'do you see them dive to cover?' and 2) I'm pretty sure people don't sit there permanently in cover in real life, so it'd seem a bit silly.
People do sit in cover permanently, in things like guard posts and such. Also, that is basically the whole point of the stealth-system. Once the team is out of stealth, the enemy know that they are in the area and take cover and such. The problem is that it normalises the encounters. Once the enemy are alerted, they should be moving from cover to cover, but they should only know vaguely where the opposition is, so it should be possible to catch them out of cover if you pull off a good flanking manoeuvre before making contact. Instead they absolutely always just happened to be taking cover from exactly the direction that you came from. Unless you were in overwatch before triggering the pod, in that case they knew that they were in a battlefield but were just merrily strolling down the middle of the street because they just don't care.
The game already has everything that it needs to have them travel in cover, they already move from cover to cover, it is just a matter of having them do so on the assumption that they are taking cover from the direction in which a recent stealth-breaking event occurred. I can see why they did it the way that they did, and I agree that it is not a terrible system, but it is well short of being a good system...
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Topic: X-Com Chimera Squad (Read 733551 times)