On the oddities and failures of Kill Zone/Covering Fire

JulianSkies
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Re: On the oddities and failures of Kill Zone/Covering Fire

Post by JulianSkies »

Hrm, looking over this discussion reminds me of something very, very similar discussed early on in the release of XCOM2.
My memory tells me that the issue was that you will only trigger Reaction Fire (Overwatch, Bladestorm, CCS, etc) on an unit entering a tile, not leaving. Either that or that the initial tile of the unit does not counts for Reaction Fire on movement.
Whichever of those is true the fact remains that the tile a unit is standing on will not trigger movement-based reactions, and players have been known use and abuse that often (such as when you are peeking out of high cover you can move into further high cover [LoSing the enemy] to get away from the overwatch). The behaviour is particularly noticeable on Killzone because while every other reaction ability has a "anything in sight" or similar behaviour Killzone has a narrow cone, meaning if anything stands at the edge of the cone they won't trigger if they move away.

My proposal for short fix, information-wise, is changing the text to indicate "Take a reaction shot against any enemy that attacks or enters a tile within a cone of fire."
DaviBones
Posts: 75
Joined: Mon Apr 03, 2017 8:30 pm

Re: On the oddities and failures of Kill Zone/Covering Fire

Post by DaviBones »

JulianSkies wrote:Hrm, looking over this discussion reminds me of something very, very similar discussed early on in the release of XCOM2.
My memory tells me that the issue was that you will only trigger Reaction Fire (Overwatch, Bladestorm, CCS, etc) on an unit entering a tile, not leaving. Either that or that the initial tile of the unit does not counts for Reaction Fire on movement.
Whichever of those is true the fact remains that the tile a unit is standing on will not trigger movement-based reactions, and players have been known use and abuse that often (such as when you are peeking out of high cover you can move into further high cover [LoSing the enemy] to get away from the overwatch). The behaviour is particularly noticeable on Killzone because while every other reaction ability has a "anything in sight" or similar behaviour Killzone has a narrow cone, meaning if anything stands at the edge of the cone they won't trigger if they move away.

My proposal for short fix, information-wise, is changing the text to indicate "Take a reaction shot against any enemy that attacks or enters a tile within a cone of fire."
Good suggestion, but for clarity, overwatch triggers when a unit moves through the relevant tile; a unit must both enter AND leave a visible tile for the overwatch shot to be fired.

So the information fix you are suggesting would actually be "Take a reaction shot against any enemy that attacks or moves through a tile within a cone of fire."

Quick side note: don't forget that several enemies have shadowstep, making them immune to all overwatch fire. For sure, Sidewinders, ADVENT Scouts, and ADVENT Commandos. Not sure if that is an exhaustive list though.
tracktwo
Long War Dev
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Re: On the oddities and failures of Kill Zone/Covering Fire

Post by tracktwo »

I don't really want to get too far into the weeds of crafting a carefully worded description that precisely describes the reaction fire mechanics only to have it get lost in the translations to other languages :)

The rough rule for OW is that it triggers when a unit enters a tile the shooter can see, with the exception that the last tile of movement never triggers reaction fire. So things like the "move through a visible tile" rule of thumb are created to explain this and are more or less accurate.

I don't really like the idea of just silently widening the cone, for a few reasons. First, it just makes it bigger. I know we could shrink the "visible" part to compensate, but this may cause people to complain that we've nerfed killzone just because it looks smaller. It also has the side effect that units that walk along the invisible edge of the cone will get targeted despite never walking into a tile that was actually painted as under killzone. From a more technical perspective, it's tricky because the cone is just defined in terms of a length and a width at the end of the cone, and the affected tiles are computed based on where you position it. With this definition of a cone there is no simple way to "just make it one tile wider on each side" - the effect of the cone width on the end and the base are very different, but both still need to be one more tile on either side. We'd need to walk all the affected tiles and find all the unaffected neighbouring tiles and add those too. Not impossible, but work.

Finally, even for units entirely within the killzone area of effect with a buffer along each side, it can fail to fire just due to the normal rules of reaction fire. As I said above, a unit that moves just one single tile to get into cover won't get shot at, because the final tile of movement doesn't count. Similarly a unit can move behind a piece of LoS blocking terrain and not get shot at, even if they started on a killzone tile in the middle of the cone.

So I still do prefer my original suggestion: just paint the tiles, and the rules are just the same as any other reaction fire. It may be surprising to people who don't understand the details of reaction fire (and I don't really expect most players to have a complete understanding of it, but "must move through a visible tile" is good enough), but this is not at all unique to killzone.
Alketi
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Re: On the oddities and failures of Kill Zone/Covering Fire

Post by Alketi »

tracktwo, now that I know the intricacies of the Killzone mechanic, I'll personally avoid the situation in question or control it as much as possible. And since the issue hasn't stirred up too much concern or interest among other players, I'm fine with leaving it as-is or with your proposal. Cheers.
Monochrome
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Joined: Fri May 05, 2017 3:53 pm

Re: On the oddities and failures of Kill Zone/Covering Fire

Post by Monochrome »

As a player who's been on the receiving end of this "feature" and been soured by how seemingly-inconsistent Killzone is, I thank everyone's investigative work on this. It's great to finally understand how Killzone actually works (even if it's now even more lacklustre than I thought it was).

In my opinion, the fundamental problem with Killzone is that the UI greatly overpromises on what will happen. Any UI lying like this should not be tolerated, so any moves the devs can make to have this UI be more honest would be excellent. How much the devs *can* do to fix this, is another matter.

Not highlighting units in the cone is a small change, but as long as either units or tiles are highlighted, the UI is telling the player "this is what will be affected by this ability".

The UI strongly implies that any unit in any painted tile should receive a Killzone shot - after all, tiles painted through other abilities (grenades, flamethrower) always receive those attacks. Regardless of whether or not reaction-fire rules make Killzone mechanically different, by painting tiles the UI is telling the player that Killzone will affect anything on a painted tile (Shadowstep excepted). If this isn't true, the UI shouldn't do it.

If I were to try and fix this, I would try to have it do the following :
  • 1) Don't paint tiles the soldier can't see because they don't have squadsight
    2) Don't paint tiles the soldier can't see because they don't have LOS
    3) Any unit on a painted Killzone tile will receive a Killzone shot - this makes it utterly consistent with other tiles-painting abilities. The user shouldn't care if some under-the-hood trickery is needed to actually make this work.
Lastly I wanted to add that at the very least, shrinking the appearance (but not the actual size) of the painted-tile cone to more accurately reflect what will actually happen would still be a positive step. The UI would should show a smaller cone than before but mechanically nothing will have actually changed, so it's not actually a nerf. Making a UI more consistent is always a good thing.
JulianSkies
Posts: 301
Joined: Thu Jan 19, 2017 12:17 am

Re: On the oddities and failures of Kill Zone/Covering Fire

Post by JulianSkies »

Monochrome wrote:As a player who's been on the receiving end of this "feature" and been soured by how seemingly-inconsistent Killzone is, I thank everyone's investigative work on this. It's great to finally understand how Killzone actually works (even if it's now even more lacklustre than I thought it was).

In my opinion, the fundamental problem with Killzone is that the UI greatly overpromises on what will happen. Any UI lying like this should not be tolerated, so any moves the devs can make to have this UI be more honest would be excellent. How much the devs *can* do to fix this, is another matter.

Not highlighting units in the cone is a small change, but as long as either units or tiles are highlighted, the UI is telling the player "this is what will be affected by this ability".

The UI strongly implies that any unit in any painted tile should receive a Killzone shot - after all, tiles painted through other abilities (grenades, flamethrower) always receive those attacks. Regardless of whether or not reaction-fire rules make Killzone mechanically different, by painting tiles the UI is telling the player that Killzone will affect anything on a painted tile (Shadowstep excepted). If this isn't true, the UI shouldn't do it.

If I were to try and fix this, I would try to have it do the following :
  • 1) Don't paint tiles the soldier can't see because they don't have squadsight
    2) Don't paint tiles the soldier can't see because they don't have LOS
    3) Any unit on a painted Killzone tile will receive a Killzone shot - this makes it utterly consistent with other tiles-painting abilities. The user shouldn't care if some under-the-hood trickery is needed to actually make this work.
Lastly I wanted to add that at the very least, shrinking the appearance (but not the actual size) of the painted-tile cone to more accurately reflect what will actually happen would still be a positive step. The UI would should show a smaller cone than before but mechanically nothing will have actually changed, so it's not actually a nerf. Making a UI more consistent is always a good thing.
Shrinking the come, however, also does strange things and make the UI lie, however! Because enemies caught at the edge of the cone that move in will still get shot.
The issue with Killzone's UI display is that it is an overwatch shot, and thus follows every last rule of this kind of shot, it can lead to a few oddities if you don't know those rules (first and last movement tiles immune to it, dependant on LoS, etc). As it is Killzone's UI is as good as it can get, the only way to make it better is to change how the ability works entirely, making it closer to how the overwatch shot on Area Suppression works would also be a choice, but that'd still make it vulnerable to all of the overwatch rules.
Monochrome
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Joined: Fri May 05, 2017 3:53 pm

Re: On the oddities and failures of Kill Zone/Covering Fire

Post by Monochrome »

JulianSkies wrote: Shrinking the come, however, also does strange things and make the UI lie, however! Because enemies caught at the edge of the cone that move in will still get shot.
True, but I'd wager that (a) enemies are more likely to move out of the cone than they are to move in, and (b) players would be far less annoyed with unexpectedly gaining a Killzone shot than in unexpectedly NOT getting one. I know I would.

Off the top of my head, the situations where I'd actually be annoyed with getting an extra Killzone shot are extremely small; not getting a Killzone shot when the UI makes it look like it would, seems to happen whenever I use Killzone and is why I've taught myself to always pick something else instead.
JulianSkies wrote: The issue with Killzone's UI display is that it is an overwatch shot, and thus follows every last rule of this kind of shot, it can lead to a few oddities if you don't know those rules (first and last movement tiles immune to it, dependant on LoS, etc). As it is Killzone's UI is as good as it can get, the only way to make it better is to change how the ability works entirely, making it closer to how the overwatch shot on Area Suppression works would also be a choice, but that'd still make it vulnerable to all of the overwatch rules.
You're absolutely correct, but the problem with this (AFAIK) is that the game doesn't ever explain what all those rules are. Compare that with the tile-painting of grenades and flamethrowers, in which the UI is telling the player very straight-forwardly "these tiles WILL be hit with the attack". Also, a player is going to have many missions under their belt by the time Killzone comes along, and the grenade & flamethrower UI will have conditioned players to understand what tile-painting and unit-highlighting means. Then Killzone comes along, uses the same UI conventions, but seems to produce (very) different results.

Saying "yes, but you also need to understand what all the overwatch rules are" is all well and good, but the Killzone UI doesn't intuitively reflect what actually happens. Hence the frustration when it doesn't do what the player thought it would do.

So I would disagree that Killzone's UI is as good as it can get. Unless the devs simply aren't able to change it as desired, in which case you're technically correct and we're stuck with it as it is. Which would be disappointing.
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