[mod request] Lower risk of friendly fire - apply penalty to hit enemy instead

[stigma]

Hey all,

I love this game, but there is one long-standing issue I feel has never been resolved - and that is the all-too-frequent occurrence of friendly-fire.

PROBLEM:
Basically any time enemies are close to your own pawns you have to very explicit babysit them, otherwise they will literally blow each-others heads off and often be a greater danger to themselves than the enemy is. Playing normally it is very common that many of the gunshot wounds you receive during a fight are from your own pawns.

EVALUATION:
I'm not saying to remove friendly fire. That is neither balanced, nor in the "shit happens, deal with it" spirit of the game. It should happen occationally, but much less frequently. Also, a counterweight is needed to prevent this from just making the game easier from what it is now.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION:
I suggest a change in the pawn combat AI that right before taking a shot evaluates if that shot has a significant risk of hitting an ally. If yes - then apply a significant accuracy debuff to hitting the targeted enemy, but also significantly lower the change of that shot hitting the ally. Some extra time may also be added to the aiming time as a penalty because the pawn needs to be extra careful with the shot. This should result in a more realistic and much less annoying simulation. If you position your troops badly you are still penalized, but you pawns will care more about not wounding your own guys than killing the enemy faster (probably in-line with most players mindset).

Modding the AI is a little out of my reach for now, but I thought I would at least give the suggestion. The more of these little frequent annoyances that happen from what players percieve as "oh my god, my colonist are all idiots!" the better and more polished the game will be (hopefully something like this eventually gets integrated into the core game).

Oh, and some basic changes to make colonist and raiders not AOE themselves or allies is also something that needs to be looked at and is very much in-line with the same problem as above. Until a better solution is available, this fix (not mine) helps a lot, and I suggest checking it out:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=21992.0

Finally, if anything like the above already exists as a mod somewhere for A14 then let me know. It's really hard to get a good overview of the mods, so sorry if I'm being redundant here

-Stigma

[TheFlameTouched]

Clicked on link to see what the fix was, found own fix. +1