Flanked Through Cover

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Tac1
Posts: 69
Joined: Sun Sep 24, 2017 9:49 am

Flanked Through Cover

Post by Tac1 »

Version 1.5, PC.

Gotcha Again, Perfect Information for LW2, A Better AWC LW2, Commander's Choice, Smooth Scrolling, Additional Icons, Cost Based Ability Colours, Uniforms Manager, and a few cosmetic mods.

Operation Gatecrasher, I've started a conflict with every pod on the map. The first pod is wiped out, the second pod took cover in a church, and the third came in from the side. The Sectoid died immediately, but the Engineer with it took cover. I moved into the side of the church to flank it, set up in High/Low cover toward it/to the left. Turn ends, the Engineer fired on the flanking XCOM and Perfect Information displayed the hit at 87%, which dealt 3(1 soaked by ablative) damage. On my turn, it says the XCOM was flanked and still is, despite the camera still displaying them as being on a Cover tile.

When originally put into this position, he was displayed and animated as being in cover, and only changed when the Aliens took their turn, at which point they fired and hit him. I'm not sure how to replicate this issue, though I've seen it happen before, albeit very rarely.

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Tac1
Posts: 69
Joined: Sun Sep 24, 2017 9:49 am

Re: Flanked Through Cover

Post by Tac1 »

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Can't believe this, but somehow we've effectively swapped positions. Somehow, though, the ADVENT isn't flanked? This game is like doing drugs, and I can't get off the ride.
tracktwo
Long War Dev
Posts: 241
Joined: Sat Jan 07, 2017 7:43 pm

Re: Flanked Through Cover

Post by tracktwo »

There's a similar thread on these issues in the main forum from a few months ago. To summarize, there are a few apparent vanilla bugs in cover, and they aren't caused by mods and they can't easily be fixed by mods.

Some of them (notably around certain SUVs and fences, but there may be others) look like cover but just ... aren't. I've reproed this myself just recently in a WotC campaign with no mods, it's definitely a vanilla issue. If you pay close attention and enemies are in the right spots you can notice this before you move to a bad location because it will report the move as showing a red flanked shield against the supposed cover.

Others, like yours, are cover that stops being cover upon the alien turn. It's very hard to repro so it's hard to debug. I did get one reproducible save of it happening, but the cover calculations are all done in native code and so are basically unmoddable. I couldn't find any way to work around it with the tools we have for modding.

Yet another are things like the disappearing lamp-post, where the cover gets reset and the unit considered flanked if you load a game where a unit is covering behind an advent lamp-post. I haven't debugged that at all but my guess is that the lamp-post is re-added to the map on the load after the soldier was placed and its cover computed.
Tac1
Posts: 69
Joined: Sun Sep 24, 2017 9:49 am

Re: Flanked Through Cover

Post by Tac1 »

F a n t a s t i c.

Thanks, anyway.
Phaseless
Posts: 225
Joined: Wed Aug 30, 2017 9:06 am

Re: Flanked Through Cover

Post by Phaseless »

Tac1 wrote:F a n t a s t i c.

Thanks, anyway.
Hey at least it's not all in your h e a d

:D

I've had this happen too (full cover not counting as cover and flanked enemies not counting as flanked) but I couldn't find the pattern.
Also as tracktwo said, if you pay Attention to the Information the game gives you, you will see if cover really is cover. And also, I think you Need a mod for this (makes the crosshair yellow when a unit is in LoS and flanked), you will see if an enemy unit Counts as flanked if you move to your Chosen Destination. That helps prevent this pretty well but still we're potentially robbed of good moves this way.
LordYanaek
Posts: 940
Joined: Mon Jan 23, 2017 1:34 pm

Re: Flanked Through Cover

Post by LordYanaek »

OK. Now it may be totally unrelated but there's a pipe on the wall in your screenshot. I wonder if it might be related. I know for sure ladders tend to cause issues with cover : they provide cover even when the wall is destroyed and sometimes will provide cover to a unit adjacent against someone who's flanking them (when considering the wall) - i have the feeling this wasn't really crystal clear :oops:

Would it be possible that 2 cover items basically sharing the same tile would conflict with each other and cause those issues? It would be interesting to check whether the disappearing cover bug always (or more frequently) occurs when some additional items are placed on the wall. Even if it doesn't help solve the bug, it would at least help us know which tiles to avoid.
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