Pavonis Interactive Forums

https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/ ... _name=Xcom

If you read that thread you can gather the general consensus is that, while Battlescanners can be useful to scout for additional pods to ensure safe aggressive flanking, the opportunity cost of an action point and a utility slot makes them not worth it, and their roles are taken up by Shinobis.

So I have a suggestion:
Any soldier that has line of sight to a battlescanned enemy is granted squadsight and long watch against it.

That grants you the ability to queue up another overwatch ambush, albeit at a non-concealed 70% aim penalty with squadsight distance aim penalties.

Do you have any ideas? Please discuss.

You're ignoring the part where Battle Scanners allow you to detect Chryssalids and Faceless without your "mobile battle scanner" shinobi getting revealed by them instead.

Another point that was largely glossed over in the reddit thread is stealth/guerilla ops. Throwing a couple scanners out on the first turn of a stealth op can often help you figure out where the enemy pods are clustering and give you an excellent idea of which way to move to avoid them entirely. This is a strategy used by xwynns in his 1.2 campaign to great effect.

It's also great for when your shinobi has gone loud to help safely clear a pod prior to encountering every enemy on the map. One carefully thrown battle scanner can help you determine where that pod is or isn't. With this knowledge, you can prepare an efficient overwatch trap or advance aggressively with full yellow moves.

Now I'm not saying that Battle Scanners are godly. You can obviously do without them OK if you can afford to infiltrate enough to keep a shinobi in stealth for the entire mission. Which I found to be the case on Veteran. But Legendary is an entirely different kettle of fish. With default infiltration times reduced by 1/6 you'll find yourself short a soldier by comparison.

If I were to change anything about Battle Scanners, it would first be to make them available sooner by making them directly available from Drone Autopsy rather than requiring a Proving Grounds project as well.

I would like to see the current battlescanner be free from the beginning of the game, and then make the proving grounds project upgrade them into something much more powerful. Bigger radius, longer duration, whatever.

Maybe the "free" starter version of scanner could simply let you see units in an (probably smaller) area, without actually revealing any hidden or disguised aliens, while the deluxe model that comes after some later research could do the revealing.

Kinda like tossing a GoPro in a hamster wheel without all the fancy alien biometric doodads attached.

I would support the notion of having a free entry-level battle scanner available from the start. I definitely miss LW1 style Battlescanner availability (and that darned useful Motion Tracker, too).

I wonder about the changes in the pod composition and deployment they are introducing in 1.3. If steathing missions is really harder battle scanners in their current form may get more valuable. That is, if you want to move past one or two pods and fight only the sentries guarding the prison etc.

I would love to see the LW1 battle scanners back

• Larger vision range
• Could be thrown further
• Gave vision for several turns

That being said, with Battle Scanners that good, Scanning Protocol would require some buff to keep up. It doesn't reveal the terrain which is annoying and is always centered on the specialist making a large part of it's (fortunately very large) AoE wasted.

They are already quite useful right now though, and the main reason for me to try and build the Proving Ground early but i would really like to have them available without requiring a PG project.

I've always thought that Scanning Protocol needs to be a free action. As it is, it has about the same range as a battlescanner, but with a higher opportunity cost. If you could pop SP and then make two moves, you could get a very useful scout.