Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

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Sines
Posts: 159
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2017 8:36 pm

Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

Post by Sines »

Overwatch Creep has always been a concern for XCOM players. Or at least since Enemy Unknown. I'm a relative noobie compared to some people. But I think an important part of combatting it is figuring out why it exists. Mission timers don't solve the problem, they just ruin that particular strategy. Meld, while much better implemented by being an optional reward, serves the same purpose. This doesn't look into what generates overwatch creep.

Well, the answer to that is the other bugbear of the game, pod activation. Aliens lie dormant, or move slowly around the map, unable to hear the raging battle taking place 50 feet away, until they can see a soldier. It doesn't matter if their own buddies are obviously shooting plasma in one directions, while lasers come back at them from the same direction, they are practically asleep until they see a soldier with their own eyes.

Pod activation creates overwatch creep because it's pretty much the best opening strategy in all occassions. Without party-wide concealment or Mimetic Skin, you can't really do any fancy setup. As soon as you can take action against the enemy, they scamper to cover. If you can catch them in an overwatch trap, you get a few free setup shots, at which point, the battle begins properly, and it might as well have been the case that you started a battle where everyone was behind cover. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no strategy to execute, because if you can attack the enemies, they can see you. Overwatch is basically your only option.

Though some might say, that if you detect them with a battlescanner or a concealed soldier, you can set up a flank. Well that's true, but the pod activation mechanic manages to completely subvert how real world tactics work. Flanking requires you to cover a larger area of ground, and that leads to more pod activation, and now your troops are more spread out, and possibly flanked themselves. In a real world situation, enemy soldiers aren't dormant until they can see the whites of your eyes. So you're encouraged to group up, and be very careful about flanking, not because you'll expose yourself to the enemy, but because the aliens allies might finally figure out why their friends are shooting things.

Meld and timers are just the band-aid to this, so the question is what solves the problem? Well, when I first saw the Haven Defense mission for Long War 2, I loved it. Enemies are streaming at you in constant waves. There are no pods to activate. Even if they're not in visual range of you, you know where they are, and they know where you are. You can move around the battlefield without worrying about bringing extra enemies into the fight. It fits thematically, as the aliens drop in to chase you as fast as they can.

So why aren't missions more often like this? I know it wouldn't fit every mission type, but relying PRIMARILY on re-inforcement drops to increase the aliens numbers removes the problem of stepping on 'enemy mines', where an incautious step sends several more aliens at you. Another option is to have larger pods, more widely spread out. Perhaps you activate 6-10 enemies all at once, but you know for a fact that as long as you can see one of them, you won't be accidentally discovering the next pod. The battle then turns into more of a Final Fantasy Tactics map, where you're free to move around safely, without fear of uncovering more enemies. Such battles would also probably encourage more defensive tactics, as you're not likely to be able to wipe out all of the enemies at once.

These fights are somewhat akin to certain story battles. Alien Base Assault, and Temple Defense in Enemy Within all feature tightly grouped enemy pods, widely seperated from each other. The HQ Defense also features streaming re-inforcements that don't really need to be activated, in the sense that they are on most missions. I think most of the Golden Path missions in XCOM 2 are similar. However, there's no reason you can't make a minor mission the equivalent to a single 'room' of these larger story missions. Instead of 8 enemies spaced throughout the map in pairs of 2 or 3, perhaps there's a single pod of 5 or 6. While they'll all activate at once, you'll be able to play a lot more 'unchained' knowing you don't need to worry about activating the other pods, because there aren't any.

So what does everyone else think? Meld is a pretty good band-aid, but it still doesn't solve the core problem of 'only one way to activate a pod well' or the fear of activating more pods. I think the 'streaming re-inforcement' and 'large but sparse pods' options solve a lot of the core issues that timers of one kind or another try to solve. I'd love to see more missions designed like this. Not just the story missions, but the minor battles as well. If done well, I think it would remove the creeping and overly cautious artificial play of avoiding more pods. It could feel more natural, and play better. It's just a matter of balancing the missions. And if the upcoming expansion or XCOM 3 could do something like this, and balance it properly, I think the series would be MUCH better for it.
Jadiel
Posts: 214
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Re: Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

Post by Jadiel »

Sines wrote:Meld and timers are just the band-aid to this, so the question is what solves the problem? Well, when I first saw the Haven Defense mission for Long War 2, I loved it. Enemies are streaming at you in constant waves. There are no pods to activate. Even if they're not in visual range of you, you know where they are, and they know where you are. You can move around the battlefield without worrying about bringing extra enemies into the fight. It fits thematically, as the aliens drop in to chase you as fast as they can.
I don't really understand this. Haven Defense is the mission where you sit on Overwatch the whole time and mop up pods as they drop into you, right? Isn't this the epitome of the OW problem?

If you want to stop OW creep, it's pretty easy. Just increase alert actions to 100%. The problem at the moment is that it's advantageous to activate on the alien turn. With 100% alert actions, it becomes more advantageous to activate on the player turn. Players will start making aggressive blue moves forward to try and activate aliens (probably followed by yellow moves back in order to avoid being patrolled into). I think that would probably do it. If not, increase OW penalties to 0.5 - that would definitely do it.

The question is, is a game where it's advantageous to activate aliens on your turn more fun than one where you want to do that on the alien turn?
Sines
Posts: 159
Joined: Tue Jan 24, 2017 8:36 pm

Re: Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

Post by Sines »

Jadiel wrote:The question is, is a game where it's advantageous to activate aliens on your turn more fun than one where you want to do that on the alien turn?
I object to the idea of activating aliens period. I favor something like Final Fantasy Tactics, where everything is active from the start of the match. Sure, you could just sit on overwatch and make them come into range first, but the aliens could do the same thing. And perhaps, these stalemates will be broken by Lightning Reflex units, who can safely trigger the Overwatches all at once (just have them dash into sight of everyone, to get the dash dodge bonus for when LR starts to run out) at which point that side will be free to strike the first major blows, apart from whatever was soaked up by their LR fodder unit.

There are problems with the idea, and how much you might have to change the game in order to implement it, but I think it would make things better, once it was done properly. As long as aliens must be activated, and as long as unactivated aliens wander around in the general vicinity of the player, then we'll have overwatch traps, and Assaults not flanking due to fear that they'll wake some sleeping giant.
Jacke
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Re: Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

Post by Jacke »

A big principle in warfare is who attacks effectively first wins, applying across many years and technologies. Ideally, it's the non-moving troops who should get the first such shot at the moving troops, but there are other confounding factors that lead to an exchange of shots until enough become effective, usually doing more to suppress one side than actually injure or kill them. That's why it's referred to as winning the fire fight.

Shots can be easily effective and it's rather fateful to leave your own troops open to attack. That means the creeping overwatch has a point. It's why it's called fire and movement, whether the maneuver units are individual soldiers or armoured vehicles. And it's common to set up ambushes and when surprised to disengage and fall back to reorg and set up to counter ambush pursuing enemy.

So in some ways, the current system in XCOM LW2, with its yellow alerted pods having some chance to get actions against XCOM is legitimate. Making the pods all activated wouldn't change things, it would still be ADVENT and XCOM troops bounding from cover to cover, overwatching, and doing a mix of reaction and deliberate shots. Except by the default configuration, the activated enemy would know roughly where unconcealed XCOM troops were. But that's also true of the XCOM player knowing roughly where the ADVENT troops are.
aedn
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Re: Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

Post by aedn »

It goes beyond pod mechanics. It's simply a side effect of a turn based game, where you have the ability to hold preemptive offensive actions when it is not your turn.

The only way to really deal with the issue is to remove overwatch from the game, thus forcing a system where the player acts, then the AI acts. I don't really think that is a good idea, as it limits variety in gameplay.

As Javiel stated reinforcements promote OW camping, not reduce it. as much as people dislike it having a time limit to complete the objective is the best option. Reinforcements as designed only impact the player if they are able to delay the player from completing the objective thus creating added pressure on the time limits, or by overwhelming the player, which only happens is the player is already at the breaking point of being able to deal with active enemies.

Having all enemies active won't really change much, it will just promote more effective variations of holding actions to gain extra attacks, namely make squadsight the defacto method of engaging enemies, so instead of using beaglerush maneuver, players will squadsight beaglerush.
Jadiel
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Re: Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

Post by Jadiel »

Sines wrote:I object to the idea of activating aliens period. I favor something like Final Fantasy Tactics, where everything is active from the start of the match. Sure, you could just sit on overwatch and make them come into range first, but the aliens could do the same thing. And perhaps, these stalemates will be broken by Lightning Reflex units, who can safely trigger the Overwatches all at once (just have them dash into sight of everyone, to get the dash dodge bonus for when LR starts to run out) at which point that side will be free to strike the first major blows, apart from whatever was soaked up by their LR fodder unit.
I still don't really understand this. The activation mechanic is essential to the premise of XCOM (a small force winning a series of skirmish battles against groups of aliens). If there were no activation mechanic and all aliens started active, then the AI would bring all the aliens together outside sight range of XCOM, and then attack from multiple directions with all the aliens on the map at once. I don't think that would be a fun game.

I get the impression that what you want is a system not where everyone is active, but one where only a single pod can be active at a time. You want to be able to play aggressively without triggering additional enemies. As you said, you'd probably be better looking at larger maps (aliens should be more spread out, and you're unlikely to encounter two pods in a similar area), but I think it's difficult to implement the experience you're looking for because it makes it harder to suspend disbelief. Again, as you said, we expect aliens to do something when they hear a firefight close by, not just sit there because only one pod can be active at a time. LW2 has improved this element significantly from Vanilla, because aliens do respond to firefight sounds close to them. It also gives the player much more information about their surroundings (through scouts and battlescanners) so you know when you can play aggressively, and can reposition your forces when you're about to stumble on a huge group of enemies (or when they are about to stumble on you!)

I'm not sure your vision of XCOM is more fun than what we currently have though. The possibility of a new pod arriving to the firefight adds a lot of tension to the game. Dealing with a bad pull due to aggressive plays makes up a lot of my best memories of XCOM. The fact that there are other groups moving around the map is what makes scouting interesting, and it's responsible for a large part of the every changing nature of the battlefield which provides a lot of the things which make the game interesting. You're talking about the problem of OW walls, but I don't think that's actually your issue with the game at all. Your issue is that 'I can't play as aggressively as I want because I might trigger extra pods', which I think is quite a different issue altogether.
AlexTFish
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Re: Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

Post by AlexTFish »

With Vanilla XCOM2, I love love love the "All Pods Active" mod. It completely removes the bizarre fictional concept of "pod activation", and adds some sensible AI to distant pods so they mostly just overwatch or cautiously blue-move towards the action. It makes flanking more sensible - you might get into LOS of a couple of enemies, sure, but that at least makes more sense than "oops, I glimpsed one trooper, now six run at me".

I suspect "All Pods Active" wouldn't work very well with LW2. I haven't tried. But I was surprised (very pleasantly surprised) how well XCOM2 worked without pod activation, with all pods active from the start; and I'm sure there ought to be some combination of tweaks that'd allow LW2 to add back that kind of concept. Because having played a modded vanilla campaign with All Mods Active and A Better ADVENT, going to LW2 and finding pod activation again feels like a step backwards.
nightwyrm
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Re: Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

Post by nightwyrm »

AlexTFish wrote:With Vanilla XCOM2, I love love love the "All Pods Active" mod. It completely removes the bizarre fictional concept of "pod activation", and adds some sensible AI to distant pods so they mostly just overwatch or cautiously blue-move towards the action. It makes flanking more sensible - you might get into LOS of a couple of enemies, sure, but that at least makes more sense than "oops, I glimpsed one trooper, now six run at me".

I suspect "All Pods Active" wouldn't work very well with LW2. I haven't tried. But I was surprised (very pleasantly surprised) how well XCOM2 worked without pod activation, with all pods active from the start; and I'm sure there ought to be some combination of tweaks that'd allow LW2 to add back that kind of concept. Because having played a modded vanilla campaign with All Mods Active and A Better ADVENT, going to LW2 and finding pod activation again feels like a step backwards.
I've played with APA on Vanilla and there are some issues I've found with it. On smaller maps, it becomes one giant, continuous fight as the entire map's aliens beeline towards you. You find the best defensible position and fortify it and try to kill the alien waves as fast as you can as they show up. On larger maps, the alien pathing AI is erratic. Aliens wander away from each other and you can find a lot of stragglers by themselves, which makes for easy kills.

More LW2-specific issues that I can foresee with APA are Squadsight turrets, MECs micro-missiling you from across the map, and your computer grinding to a halt on swarming missions. My computer was not happy when I was using APA on Waterworld or Avenger defense.
Stroggus
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Re: Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

Post by Stroggus »

Ok, let`s be honest here. The ONLY difficulty in this game - "BAD ACTIVATIONS". Thats it. I mean the only difficult part in tactical is that you don`t activate too much pods. Really. Nothing else. So you must think not how to fight, but how to NOT fight.

Not that it would happen, but I`d like to see less pods, but tougher ones. Like ~10 aliens pods (and tougher ayys), but only couple of them on a map, so when you engage you can actually fight and do maneuvers. So you would have a fair fight with aliens. Not stomp them without "bad activatons" or get stomped (or not-so-much) with "bad activations".

Thats in short.
rlkr83
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Re: Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

Post by rlkr83 »

Jadiel wrote:I get the impression that what you want is a system not where everyone is active, but one where only a single pod can be active at a time. You want to be able to play aggressively without triggering additional enemies.
This is how vanilla XC2 works. It's called downthrottling. The game lets you engage a maximum number of enemies before it tells other nearby pods to go away to avoid overwhelming you. Counterbalanced by upthrottling, which tells those pods to come back after a certain number of turns. The combination of the two simulates the notion that the pod was cautiously approaching your position the whole time and arrived at the moment of maximum dramatic tension where you just gained enough advantage against the original pod that you're going to beat them for sure, but they're not all gone yet.

LW2 completely removed this throttle mechanic to make the game more honest, and actually implements the underlying behavior that was previously simulated (by way of Yellow Alert pods). http://ufopaedia.org/index.php/Mechanic ... l_Behavior

As for the problem of overwatch baiting, that exists fundamentally because there are a lot of features in the game that violate the core mechanic of turn-based combat. The way pods activate, scamper, and how concealed overwatch (vs. regular overwatch, which is still somewhat broken but not nearly as badly) interacts with that situation is a big problem. (To say nothing of the total BS of the Ruler Reaction phase.) The scamper mechanic is the main problem: you dont get a free turn when you spot aliens, so why do they get a free turn when they spot you? Also the way overwatch got implemented is completely different from (and I'd argue a lot worse than) the Reaction Fire mechanic in the original X-COM: UFO Defense.

http://ufopaedia.org/index.php/Reactions
http://ufopaedia.org/index.php/Reaction_Fire
http://ufopaedia.org/index.php/Reaction_fire_formula
http://ufopaedia.org/index.php/Reaction_fire_triggers

Even the way movement has been handled in the new games is a bit of a problem. Old X-COM would stop your move order as soon as an enemy is spotted so you can make a tactical decision, or else just outright kill you with a reaction shot out of the fog of war if the enemy spotted you and you didn't spot them.

In the new mechanic, you either blue move or yellow move, and if you get spotted along the path it automatically works against you no matter what. You have no opportunity to spot enemies on your turn during a move and take a reaction shot. Thats the problem with the scamper mechanic, because thats exactly what the enemy is doing in that situation. They can always do it and you can never do it. Totally asymmetric mechanics.

LW2 also isn't particularly respectful of the core mechanic of turn-based combat, by giving you perks like Serial. Also Firaxis and Pavonis both need to decide whether concealment is as-a-squad (and therefore once per mission) or per-unit (and therefore regainable), and fix all concealment-related mechanics accordingly. Right now it's halfsies-whichever-I-dunno-lol.
Sines
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Re: Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

Post by Sines »

Stroggus wrote:Ok, let`s be honest here. The ONLY difficulty in this game - "BAD ACTIVATIONS". Thats it. I mean the only difficult part in tactical is that you don`t activate too much pods. Really. Nothing else. So you must think not how to fight, but how to NOT fight.

Not that it would happen, but I`d like to see less pods, but tougher ones. Like ~10 aliens pods (and tougher ayys), but only couple of them on a map, so when you engage you can actually fight and do maneuvers. So you would have a fair fight with aliens. Not stomp them without "bad activatons" or get stomped (or not-so-much) with "bad activations".

Thats in short.
I think this is a good point. Pod Activation mechanics works well on small 'guerilla' missions, whereby any pod engaged one at a time is relatively easily dealt with, and the challenge is in not activating more of them. But I also think it'd be better if we had more "Large, Spread Out Pods" wherein you got a very large pod activation, but you could be near guaranteed you wouldn't trigger more if you sent an Assault around back of them.

Also, as far as something like Haven Defense and Overwatching Reinforcements. If the re-inforcements drop into the fog of war, they won't get overwatch shot. If you hold back and decide to let them walk into your overwatch, then more aliens come in, and the aliens can let their forces build up. It encourages some more proactive actions, to keep up with the re-inforcement waves, because for most builds, Overwatch will always be less effective than taking a proper turn, and you need as much firepower as possible to keep up with the constant waves. Overwatch shots on landing re-inforcements would be a 'reward' for finishing off the current wave with actions to spare. As long as killing an entire reinforcement wave isn't too easy, then you'll hardly be able to overwatch slaughter each subsequent one, at least not without building a group of overwatch-specced Rangers.
rlkr83
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Joined: Thu Mar 02, 2017 5:38 pm

Re: Overwatch Creep and Pod Mechanics

Post by rlkr83 »

The more I think about it, actually, the more I think concealment needs to be broken into two different concepts.

1. Does the enemy know that the zone is hot. (Alert)
2. Does the enemy specifically know how many soldiers you have fielded and where they are. (Spotted)

LW2 has attempted to separate these via Yellow Alert, but the way concealment is gained and lost is still inconsistent.

Alert needs to be an as-a-squad attribute. If the ayys are spooked it doesn't really matter why, the reinforcement stuff needs to start happening, and pods should be actively searching for you. Breaking windows, detonating explosives, one-shotting lone drones, etc, should trip Alert, but should not result in being Spotted as long as there is no enemy LOS on any of those things. Alerted pods should move towards any locations they know about that caused Alert. Maybe in a straight line, maybe in some more sophisticated search pattern. Maybe it depends on the pod composition. Maybe the pod is smart enough to cover the objective rather than run to the sound.

Spotted is per-unit. Any unit that has not actually been seen by the enemy should remain concealed.

By way of achieving this, for starters, Phantom should be removed as a perk, and all soldiers should have it by default as a hidden attribute. The enemy effectively already does: when you activate a pod, you don't suddenly know where every other enemy is on the map.

Also either:

(A) Remove concealed overwatch entirely and replace it with regular overwatch. If you plan on firing when you spot an enemy, then you're going to do it. That's not contingent on whether the enemy knows your buddy is nearby.
OR, alternative formulation,
(B) Implement both overwatches and make concealed overwatch trip on enemy fire or proximity (because this is a meaningful signal that combat has begun, whereas the abstract knowledge of you in the enemy's head really isn't).

Edit:

The even more more I think about it, overwatch needs to be programmable to be useful in all the circumstances it should logically cover. There should be a few different types of overwatch that you can choose among. That would require some kind of sub-menu to choose your overwatch type, which doesn't seem to have any precedent in the UI. That opens the door to solving a lot of overwatch-related problems at once.
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