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Are enemies psychic?

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2017 8:49 pm
by SmokingBuffalo
I'm not sure if this is a long war thing or a vanilla thing but evidently enemies know the exact position of my troops all the time. I'm not talking about "enemies moving towards us during concealment" feature btw.

My problem is that for example; i have 2 soldiers behind a train and on the other side of the train there is a pod and the rest of my trrops. The two soldiers have no LoS to enemy. So i break concealment with my troops near the pod and start the engagement. Everything is going fine untill, the MEC somehow knows where my 2 soldiers are positioned and bombards them. Or a stun lancer somehow knows where they are and dashes toward them to do his stun attack.

I don't know if this is a bug or a feature but i think it's stupid because it takes away the adventage of breaking LoS with the enemy. What's the point of hiding behind a building if the enemy can destroy your cover/rush your position without having LoS to you.

Anyway rant over, i hope i made myself clear my English is really rusty. Thanks in advance.

Re: Are enemies psychic?

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2017 9:24 pm
by tekronis
Even in vanilla X-Com 2, if you are engaged with a pod (meaning you have broken concealment), every enemy knows where every un-concealed soldier of yours is automatically.

Re: Are enemies psychic?

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2017 9:54 pm
by SmokingBuffalo
Oh well, thanks for the info.

Re: Are enemies psychic?

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2017 10:30 pm
by TempuSFatumA
I've posted concealment rework suggestion here. Maybe that will fix your problem, so tell what you think about it in that theme. Maybe LW team will add it. ;)

Re: Are enemies psychic?

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2017 10:47 pm
by GavinRuneblade
Knowing that any sentence starting with "technically " just marks the speaker as a pedant... technically sectoids ethereals, and gatekeepers are very psychic.

Re: Are enemies psychic?

Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2017 11:58 pm
by NephilimNexus
Changes worth noting:

1) Certain alien/advent units have the equivalent of "squadsight" now. Won't spoil it by saying which.

2) Just as with your own units, advent does not require that the unit firing the rocket/grenade have direct LOS to you. Only that someone does to spot it for them.

Re: Are enemies psychic?

Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2017 6:13 am
by SmokingBuffalo
NephilimNexus wrote:Changes worth noting:

2) Just as with your own units, advent does not require that the unit firing the rocket/grenade have direct LOS to you. Only that someone does to spot it for them.
I know that, but my problem isn't about that.

let's say _ is full cover, x is my soldiers, y is advent

. . . . y . . . y

____________________________ x
. . . . . . x

Now in this situation Advent troops can't see the soldier behind the wall, but they can still target him with grenades/dash attacks. Which means they know where he is without having LoS

Re: Are enemies psychic?

Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2017 6:49 am
by 8wayz
As pointed above, this was an issue with original XCOM 2, especially for lancers. They would run from the fog of war, traverse 1/2 to 3/4 of the width of the map and then hit your soldier behind high cover.

Since aliens had fewer explosives in the original version, you did not see that behavior as often as you see it now concerning rockets and grenades.

Re: Are enemies psychic?

Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2017 6:57 am
by Goumindong
SmokingBuffalo wrote:I'm not sure if this is a long war thing or a vanilla thing but evidently enemies know the exact position of my troops all the time. I'm not talking about "enemies moving towards us during concealment" feature btw.

My problem is that for example; i have 2 soldiers behind a train and on the other side of the train there is a pod and the rest of my trrops. The two soldiers have no LoS to enemy. So i break concealment with my troops near the pod and start the engagement. Everything is going fine untill, the MEC somehow knows where my 2 soldiers are positioned and bombards them. Or a stun lancer somehow knows where they are and dashes toward them to do his stun attack.

I don't know if this is a bug or a feature but i think it's stupid because it takes away the adventage of breaking LoS with the enemy. What's the point of hiding behind a building if the enemy can destroy your cover/rush your position without having LoS to you.

Anyway rant over, i hope i made myself clear my English is really rusty. Thanks in advance.
There isn't a good way to solve this problem of AI. Imagine for a second the opposite case, that when a unit leaves LOS the AI entirely forgets that the unit exists at all. In this case it would be super easy to set up flanks/ambushes etc. It would be easy to cheese the AI because you could just move to outside of LOS and the enemy would walk into really dumb ambushes.

The problem is that without a fuzzy concept of "location" which humans can do very easy, the generic "forgets where a unit is" and "forgets that a unit exists at all" are precisely the same. It would be nice if the AI could attempt to figure out where a potential unit is given where it left visual range from. However, fuzzy concepts like this are not things that computers do well, which is to say that they do not do things fast. The computer would "have" to run its algorithm for each individual space the unit could be in, develop a probability that each unit would be in that space, and then run a new algorithm that decided where to go'/what to do based on where the enemy might be.

As it stands the AI uses a kludge. It knows precisely where you are for attacking purposes but doesn't consider units it cannot see for positioning purposes (unless its going to attack one of the units it cannot see). This lets you use LOS to "cleverly" set up ambushes. But doesn't mean that any unit you move out of LOS is invulnerable.

It would be nice if this behavior could be trimmed for certain types of enemies/attacks. But i am not sure there is a particularly good way to do it.

Re: Are enemies psychic?

Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2017 7:06 am
by Garthor
Also note that YOU know where the enemy is in fog of war by carefully inspecting areas which your soldiers are allowed to move to and noticing "hey I can't stand on this side of the doorway over there I WONDER WHY".

So I mean fair's fair, right?