Covering fire

[Dr. Z]

I was just writing a post about repostioning in combat in the friendly fire threat when I had the idea of a covering fire/suppression function: The preson would shoot at a much higher rate of fire, but with a greately reduced accuracy (maybe even force miss). The person he covers would have decreased accuracy and maybe even longer aim-time because he need to doge some bullets. It's pretty much the same like in X-COM and from experience I can say that it's one of the greatest abillities in the game. This would also even up the odds against the larger enemy waves where you are 3 to 1 short-handed and be a use for the bad shooters in your team or even the people who regret using weapons, because they wouldn't actually shoot at someone. When your soldiers reach a high shooting skill, the chance to hit someone with suppression could be increased.

Another obivous use would be to haul incapped colonists from the battlefield. Atm, this means even more wounds or incapps in most cases and it would be great to have something to counter this.

[StorymasterQ]

IMO X-Com-style Overwatch would only work in a turn-based environment. I'm not seeing how it can be applied on a real-time battle such as Rimworld.

[Kagemusha]

It's a nice idea. But, it would be odd to implement a turn-based mechanic into a real time combat situation.

It did make me think that actual suppression might be a nice touch to add. The concept that people have a natural tendency to keep their heads down when there is incoming fire. We have a morale mechanic in place, but I think that is general and wouldn't work as well for this.

What I was thinking was that the raider/colonist would register incoming fire and at certain threshholds receive a penalty to accuracy or fire-rate, or both. This would represent them keeping their head down for fear of losing an eye (or a leg with the current system )

Sorry for hijacking the thread. Covering fire relies on the concept of suppression. So it's only a partial hijack. Having an actual "Suppression Fire" button or option would be a little gimmicky I feel. Yet, simultaneously I feel it might actually be pretty cool to have the option to unload with less accuracy just to make use of the suppression mechanic.

Of course this would lead to an imbalance because we have no ammunition or reloading in the game (yet...maybe) and without ammo concerns or timing concerns for reloading this mechanic would work against a smaller squad rather than in favour of said squad. Imagine twenty of the 100 man raiding party are suppressing you.

[Dr. Z]

Guys, the grey things are the letters, so please read before answer.

@StorymasterQ: I'm not talking about overwatch, but about suppression, and constantly fireing to keep the enemy down IS possible in a real-time fight.

@Kagemusha: As I said, it is possible, and you didn't hijacked the threat, you where accidentally agreeing with me "that actual suppression might be a nice touch to add".

So, to avoid any further missunderstandings (let's call it like that), here again the core thoughts of my idea:
"The preson would shoot at a much higher rate of fire, but with a greately reduced accuracy (maybe even force miss). The person he covers would have decreased accuracy and maybe even longer aim-time because he need to doge some bullets."

[Mystic]

I kind of like the idea of adding suppressing fire as another option when you right click on an opponent.  A problem is that right now neither colonists nor opponents seem to have any sense of self-preservation ... they will gladly jump out to fire right when a stream of bullets is coming their way.  It might be nice to build in something in general that reduces a pawn's accuracy whenever there are bullets actively coming their way (regardless of whether it is technically the "suppressing fire" option or not), or when bullets are hitting anything within a certain distance of them (whichever is easier for the game engine to calculate in real time).  Then, all the "suppressing fire option" would need to do is to increase the colonist's rate of fire while greatly decreasing their accuracy, as was suggested above.  This should result in the same overall effect, but in a more organic way.

What I like about this approach is that it would have the advantage of allowing the suppressing fire to affect more than one opponent if they happen to be bunched up in a group, and because it would allow the effect of suppressing fire to be equally present without even selecting the option if your colonists greatly outnumber their current opponent or are concentrating their fire on a single opponent or area.  I'd especially welcome that latter aspect because it always bugs me that one opponent will so often be able to wade into a fight with significantly more colonists and still manage to badly damage or even kill one of my colonists before going down, completely undaunted by the extreme volume of fire coming his way.  This mechanic wouldn't (and shouldn't) wholly prevent that possibility, but it ought to be a lot more difficult for the solo opponent in that situation to have such perfect aim when a whole group of opponents are raining fire down on him.

If this were present, I could see some of the current pawn attributes (like "Steadfast", perhaps) having the effect of making the pawn more resistant to the loss of accuracy while under heavy/suppressing fire.  (Or additional attributes, if that works better.)

[Rahjital]

Suppression would be great, as it would provide a way to allow tactically moving from cover to not be a suicide order, but the problem is that it innately favours larger groups. If you can suppress them, they can suppress you, and if there's more of them, they'll always have somebody free to send a hail of bullets at your pawns no matter how much suppressing you do.

[Ink.]

Surely suppression could be as simple as using the F key to fire in the enemies direction and then adding a penalty for pawns that have incoming fire close enough. Could be pretty simple to implement but add a bit of depth to the combat system.

[Wex]

Also, suppressing fire with a minigun would be a massacre anyway.