FOG OF WAR
Phantom
Please add Fog of war to all tactical missions. I do not care about how vision is implemented in the game, either full 360° or only 180°, but there should be at least some visible mechanic. I start a mission and enter the map and I can see the whole map from the beginning. I go somewhere with one of my soldiers and suddenly out of nowhere magically an enemy appears. All your ingame stats for vision like “perception” or “stealth” are meaningless in its current form. How do I know how far 15 perception is if there is no indicator ingame? Should I count tiles after every move of my soldiers? It is also immersion breaking.
Vit Barta
Merged in a post:
A Proposal to bring back that sense of Menace
Mike Ibeji
Surely the simple solution is to link the amount of the map that is revealed to the Squad’s Perception.
I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but as an example, a Squaddie with Perception 20 can see 20 tiles ahead of him/her - halved to 10 at night - and the rest of the map is black.
How difficult is it to do something as simple as that in PP?
Of course the devs would have to figure out how to ‘reveal’ a Chiron once it started firing - or cue the cries of outrage from players who don’t like being shelled by indirect artillery fire (a fact of life of all modern wars, guys). But anything that actually makes these missions feel spooky and threatening is surely worth a try…
Florin Adrian
So fog of war. That is surely spooky. To this day I remember my first mission ever in UFO1. It should have been easy, just a very small ship with one Floater crew but at night and because of the lack of visibility and my inexperience, I lost two soldiers and abandoned another and never seen the enemy.
Without fog of war, PD is just a modded chess game with no visceral impact.
DayDull.com
I disagree with the first part - I don't think that would be more fun to have to reveal the map every time. Plus, your soldiers were just dropped off from an aircraft--they have seen the whole area from the sky, and you also have satellite imagery.
For the second part about perception and stealth I greatly agree. Perception / stealth needs visual indicators on screen, the only way to use it now seems to be counting tiles and doing math to adjust for stealth stats on the fly turn after turn.
Mike Ibeji
DayDull.com: As a matter of interest: which game do you find more tense - PP or XCOM?
DayDull.com
Mike Ibeji: XCOM 2 is more tense I suppose. But it also had a more robust and user-friendly stealth/concealment system.
Perhaps fog of war would be okay in PP if it was implemented well. I guess I just really dislike the way fog of war works in PP on some of the attack a nest missions. I wouldn't want to deal with that on all missions.
There's some weird quirks, like when a soldier goes up to a wall at a corner, they should reveal what's around the corner. But it doesn't work that way at least some of the time.
Mike Ibeji
DayDull.com: I'm not convinced that is deliberately designed 'Fog of War' - I think it's some kind of bug in the Nest generation code. But I may be wrong.
Mike Ibeji
It should be based on perception. One of the best things in XCOM was the fact that you couldn't see further than your perception stat in the dark - made night missions proper spooky!
Should be the same here. During the day, you can spot enemies and see detail as far as your best soldier's perception range and everything beyond that should be blurred (like the Stealth overlay). At night, you should HALVE that perception range, unless you're wearing motion sensors or night-sight goggles.