Incline Fallout 2 Mechanics Overhaul Mod Discussion

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Because it's now more or less possible and I like feature creep I've decided to try and improve upon the AI:

What's good about the Fallout AI is the variety of actions it can take, like:

-move
-attack
-pick up items off the ground
-switch weapons
-use chems
-flee*

Combined with selecting targets based on differing factors such as weakness or proximity, that's already a pretty good list. What is, however, deeply wrong with the AI is that it (a) doesn't check which action to perform nearly often enough, and (b) makes poor calls when it does.

An example of the first point is that a ranged critter will (correctly) decide to move if he can't hit his opponent, but then (idiotically) doesn't check again which action to take that turn until he's standing one hex away from him, even if moving just one hex would offer him a nice shot and getting too close to his opponent would be insane. Similarly, the AI won't consider moving after having made an attack, even if a single step to the left would put him in cover. Another example is that weapon selection occurs only when a critter runs out of ammo or loses his weapon.

An example of the AI taking poor decisions is that positioning is completely irrelevant to him. He'll gladly huddle around his buddies while his opponent is lobbing grenades, or keep standing in a nice line to be bursted down. Weapon selection, in the rare cases it does occur, is simply an affair of seeing which weapon deals the highest max damage (and, for some weird reason, the lowest min damage) and if he has enough AP left to use it that same turn. Things like called shots, secondary attacks, and whether or not to use area attacks are also completely randomized.

So my priority lies with improving these two elements (though I'd also like to increase the variety eventually by having the AI pick locks, heal allies, take weapons/ammo from containers, not just the ground, etc.).

To do this, having the AI perform its actions in smaller "segments" (e.g. moving till within range of its enemy, attacking, then checking whether it has enough AP left to walk back into cover in the classic three-part peek around the corner trick), and having it pay more attention to its weapon selection (conserve ammo against weak opponents, use area attacks against groups, etc.), movement (spread out when advisable, seek cover rather than flee willy nilly when scared, etc.) and skill usage would already be a large step forward.

An example to show the problem with the AI not making decisions frequently enough:



The AI can't see me, so he decides to move towards me. He doesn't check whether he can attack until he reaches me (at which point he has no more AP's left), even tho he has a ranged weapon and I could one-hex burst him to bits the next turn. An early version of a possible "cautious" AI approach that makes more frequent decisions:



I was hoping on some imput on interesting AI possibilities. Maybe some games do interesting things (JA2?)?SCO tuluse, you guys were talking about the crappiness of the AI in the shoutbox a short while ago, some additional ideas maybe?

DraQ, I remember you had some very interesting ideas throughout this thread that I commonly dismissed because I didn't see it working in combination with the default AI, which I can of course just look up again when I'm not feeling lazy. The one I do remember is timed grenades, which I should be able to now implement and have the AI respond to/use itself.


*: fleeing is of course an annoying problem outside of its brainlessness. I'd prefer moving to a system of either withdrawing behind cover or surrendering.

 

[DraQ]

I'll need to review this thread.

You can have both fleeing, surrendering and cover.

Fleeing should check if there is anywhere to flee to and how difficult it would be (distance, running past hostiles, running inside hostiles' ranges), cover should be used by the AI in asshole manner to minimize exposure whenever doing stuff not requiring LOS like reloading, using items, etc.

Also, AI could check for the spots within grenade's blast radius around the enemy (player, mostly) where it could place a grenade without exposing itself - a nice way to flush player from cover and force movement when the player pins the AI behind cover.

 

[tuluse]

I complain about a lot of things in shoutbox, don't know if it makes me an expert

I think you have to decide if you want your AI to create tactical scenarios or verisimilitudely simulate what a person would expect people (or critters) would do. For example, there might be situations where the harder tactical situation for the player is if a combatant attacks or stays still or something, but he has 10 hp and should be running away if he had any sense. So you can see how these situations can be at odds.

Another thing you want to think about (this will give DraQ a headache) is that this is still a game. Chasing down flee-ers with 10 hp is not very fun. Fallout doesn't have any way of resolving combat except to have all of one side dead. Likewise, I'm not sure what the point of surrendering would be, just so you can execute them easily?

In my experience the JA2 AI mostly just hides behind cover and takes pot shots. The rules support this and it *looks* like something a real person would do, so it's effective. So if you have Fallout npcs playing turn based popamole, using aoe weapons at the fight times and avoiding timed grenades, that's an excellent start. I would say that if a ranged NPC can attack and move somewhere where line of sight is broken from attackers, he should always do that I think.

Something to think about would be if NPCs were aware of where their friends were and tried to support them (or be supported by them), while taking into account that Fallout shooting mechanics means lots of friendly fire.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I complain about a lot of things in shoutbox, don't know if it makes me an expert

I thought you'd make a nice counterbalance to my fellow simulationist buddies, The Brazilian Slaughter and DraQ , though Kaucukovnik and Clockwork Knight have done a good job of that in the past.

I think you have to decide if you want your AI to create tactical scenarios or verisimilitudely simulate what a person would expect people (or critters) would do. For example, there might be situations where the harder tactical situation for the player is if a combatant attacks or stays still or something, but he has 10 hp and should be running away if he had any sense. So you can see how these situations can be at odds.

Another thing you want to think about (this will give DraQ a headache) is that this is still a game. Chasing down flee-ers with 10 hp is not very fun.

Yeah, that's what I was referring to at the end of my post. Especially with melee combat, chasing down enemies fleeing becomes like some weird version of Zeno's Achilles and the Tortoise paradox, where overtaking a slower enemy becomes impossible because you need additional AP's to attack as well. Add to that the fact that this isn't an open world, but a map-based game and the concept of fleeing just doesn't fit that well, even though I like it in theory as a doctrinal simulationist.

Fallout doesn't have any way of resolving combat except to have all of one side dead. Likewise, I'm not sure what the point of surrendering would be, just so you can execute them easily?

The idea I had was that you would have three types of negotiated surrender:

-status quo ante (simply end combat)
-conditional surrender (all critters on the surrendering team drop all their loot except for weapons, part of their ammo, and their armor)
-unconditional surrender (they drop everything)

In the last case, if they're surrendering to the player, they also "surrender" all of their xp value; in the case before that half of their xp value. So if you want to mow down defenseless enemies you won't get anything for it (except for a reputation as someone you shouldn't negotiate with).

Anyway, this is just a system I would use in a new, more elaborate random encounter system I'm working on. Here incentives can be that a third team can join combat to prevent the losing team from being wiped out, etc. In the regular game it'd be hard to implement you being able to once again be on good (or at least decent) terms with the team you just were in combat with (especially because I don't want to touch the regular scripts so that the mod is compatible with other mods/the future FO1 conversion).

Something to think about would be if NPCs were aware of where their friends were and tried to support them (or be supported by them), while taking into account that Fallout shooting mechanics means lots of friendly fire.

Yeah, though I'm also considering having these types of things depend on the leadership skill I added a while ago, though I'm not exactly sure how yet. I like the idea of an enemy team with a clear designated leader shouting orders (floating text), who you can take down after which his team mates become both more likely to surrender and more "egotistical" in combat.

Also, AI could check for the spots within grenade's blast radius around the enemy (player, mostly) where it could place a grenade without exposing itself - a nice way to flush player from cover and force movement when the player pins the AI behind cover.

If you're going to have a AI capable of cover and grenades you need hex shooting too - FOnline games already have it and its very rad. I still shudder when I remember the MILKOR bombardment in early Ashes of Phoenix. That might take enemies with explosives to a new level of menace.

Giving the AI the ability to target hexes would be cool, but I'm still not sure how to handle the AI's "knowledge" in such cases: does the AI have telepathic knowledge of the player's location just around the corner in the same way the player has of his location? I suppose I could give the fog of war options in the HD patch a try and see if that could become a recommended option for my mod, not sure yet.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Yeah, that's what I was referring to at the end of my post. Especially with melee combat, chasing down enemies fleeing becomes like some weird version of Zeno's Achilles and the Tortoise paradox, where overtaking a slower enemy becomes impossible because you need additional AP's to attack as well. Add to that the fact that this isn't an open world, but a map-based game and the concept of fleeing just doesn't fit that well, even though I like it in theory as a doctrinal simulationist.

Maybe there's a way for the NPC to check if there's an "escape route" (exit grid) nearby? Like, within two or three turns of movement, or hex "units". If not, he stays to fight (maybe with a stat/skill penalty to simulate bad morale, but that might be too complex for this kind of combat). This way you wouldn't have to chase down some guy who is still in combat even though he's on the other side of town, while still keeping the "enemies flee when it's sensible" flavor.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Having some fun with energy weapons. I talked a while ago about how I wanted each energy weapon type to have its own distinct mechanics, which I'm now finally able to do animation-wise as well.

For lasers, I thought it would be interesting if they could pass through targets if the armor didn't stop it (so the damage value of laser bolts decreases with every obstacle they pass through). Also, I thought it'd be amusing if they could ricochet off of walls (maybe just metal walls and metal armors, tho I'm not sure which direction they'd bank when hitting a critter, maybe just random?). The wall ricochets don't work for corners (yet), but north/south and east/west walls work nicely:



For plasma, I wanted to have splash damage, but I'm still not sure how to do it animation-wise (so for I've tried just have it split into difference plasma balls on impact, but that looks a bit weird). In the meantime, I also put together something like the shockrifle in UT, with a really wide cone effect for testing:





Next up, I'll try and do some fun stuff with explosives (wall bounces for grenades, doors and containers flying around crushing people, fun!).

 

[tuluse]

I was talking to Jim about this in shoutbox, gonna post it here for further discussion.

I told him he should add a -AP effect when the game fires off a near miss bark. He said he didn't like the idea because with flat AP, it represents time instead of potential actions now. I replied this was fine as it's simulates spending a certain amount of time on your turn dodging bullets instead of acting.

Anyways, this would allow for suppression fire and should increase tactically I think.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Know how explosions make everybody fly around and how much fun that is? There's two things wrong with it: (1) flying critters don't bowl over existing critters, which they totally should, (2) they don't fly away from the epicenter of the explosion, but away from the attacker, which doesn't make any sense. Now witness how much more fun it is if they do both (I mostly wanted to demonstrate point 2, so I was a bit hasty, but there's some examples of point 1 too):

 

[tuluse]

Jim you should get OBS so you can record without that bandicam text.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Do all critters thrown others away and all the time? Because having Super Mutants sent flying by a human that has already been sent flying by another human is a bit ridiculous...

Ha, yeah I'm just working on the basics right now. Eventually stuff like critter strength + distance travelled by the flying critter hitting him (not to mention that one perk that affects getting knocked down whose name I forget) will affect it.

That reminds me that I'll probably give grenades and rockets a 3 hex radius rather than the current 2 hex one and scale down the effects/damage as you get further from the center (normally explosions do the exact same damage to everyone).

 

[dunno lah]

Jim the Dinosaur
Is the ability to aim at anywhere with grenades and rockets(like in your vids) implemented in your mod? If so, pretty cool.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Jim the Dinosaur
Is the ability to aim at anywhere with grenades and rockets(like in your vids) implemented in your mod? If so, pretty cool.

It will be, yeah. Hex aiming will become a big part of energy weapons and explosives (which I'll show off in the next couple of vids).

One thing to keep in mind is that I'm basically overriding the entire combat system at this point, which'll have some inevitable drawbacks alongside all the new possibilities (e.g. whether I can keep the vanilla aiming UI is a big question).

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

First, a couple of last energy weapons vids. I adjusted the projectiles so they're invisible when too close to the attacker firing them only after making these vids, so the gatling laser one looks a bit silly.

For pulse weapons, I thought it would be amusing to have an trailing effect: once the projectile reaches its destination (which as you'll see can just be an empty hex), it "chooses" a target from a cone that's constructed behind it, and so on until it reaches its max range (or something blocks it). This means you can, with some effort, get to targets behind walls. I'll need to put together something that lets you see the exact hexes an attack can reach for this type of weapon (and burst and explosives obvs):



For plasma weapons, I thought it could be interesting to have splash damage translated as a "puddle" that does damage the next (couple of) round(s) to those standing on it. A possible alt-fire would create a larger puddle, and would be hex-based rather than target-based:



I felt the gatling laser should be mechanically similar to other laser weapons (including rudimentary wall ricochets); looks a bit iffy but eh:



All in all I'm pretty satisfied with the variety in energy weapons now (I've also put in the Spasm Gun from FOT, which'll mostly be about status effects and becomes more effective based on the target's perception and intelligence).

I've also decided to take another look at my to hit formula, which is hopelessly convoluted and would be very hard to integrate with all the new combat features made possible anyway.

Let's restate the main problem with the vanilla to hit formula: it's a system that (when you're being generous) only really worked as intended for a very short period in the early mid-game, when there's an actual decision to be made whether or not to try a high risk called shot or a low-risk uncalled one. For the vast majority of the game, there's no meaningful choice to be made and you transition fairly quickly from no-brain uncalled to no-brain eye-crits (or, for fast shot, there isn't even any type of transition).

The reason for this is of course that as you get better at hitting the enemy, the enemy doesn't get (much) better at dodging those attacks. The devs tried half-heartedly to balance this by implementing D&D-type silliness of better armor making you harder to hit, but this doesn't accomplish much in practice.

Now, given that in my mod, heavy armor makes you easier to hit in most cases, this to hit chance issue would become even more glaring, if not for the following steps that solve everything in my head:

- AP's spent to aim. You get a very large to hit penalty for trying to attack at the minimum AP cost.
- Movement and attack AP's are separated. You can "simultaneously" attack and move, but at a significant to hit penalty for each hex moved.
- Missing one bodypart can result in hitting an adjacent one (especially extremely hard to hit "embedded" bodyparts will often result in hitting, e.g., the head instead).

So now when you have:

- A very good shot: you can spend the bare minimum of AP's and move around while attacking (which, unlike heavier armor, does make you harder to hit), or spend time "concentrating" (the equivalent of the unused AP defense bonus in the vanilla game, except it now doesn't cost AP's, just a to hit penalty). Or you can spend a lot of AP's to aim for the eyes and have an almost certain chance of hitting them.
- A very bad shot: you need to spend a significant amount of AP's to get a good to hit chance, and need to spend the maximum to have a chance of hitting a hard to hit bodypart (and even then probably hitting an adjacent one).

The big advantage of the way it works in my creative mind is that this makes combat decisions such as whether or not to go for the eyes prevalent throughout the game.

I would also like burst (and perhaps explosions) to work roughly the same mechanically as single shots in this regard. In vanilla bursts worked in a weird way THC-wise, with 1/8th of the bullets having their THC calculated "normally" for the intended target, and the rest working with an odd knockout system where a single miss would result in every subsequent bullet in the list missing as well.

I would like every single bullet in the burst to work according to the same rules as for a single shot, which produces a conceptual problem, namely that every burst bullet is treated as an "intended" attack, rather than simply the result of spray, and why would Ian intentionally burst your back?

I'm still not sure how to deal with this, but the general idea I have is that you no longer aim your burst at one enemy, but at everyone within a certain area whose size you can change. Thus, Ian will still probably burst you to bits when you're standing right in front of him, but this will be unintended and the result of bursting many rounds steadily reducing his aim (and thus not mechanically different from him hitting you in the back when trying a difficult single shot at an enemy behind you).

Any thoughts (also on the energy weapons)?

 

[tuluse]

What if you didn't use a knockout system but kept the mis-aimed shots? So each bullet of the burst could have the right target or the wrong target based on a die roll or something.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

What if you didn't use a knockout system but kept the mis-aimed shots? So each bullet of the burst could have the right target or the wrong target based on a die roll or something.

Well, the point is that with a 80 round minigun burst, you often have more than one intended target, which is what I was getting at with the area targetting.

The misaimed shots would still be in, but they would no longer be strictly inevitable. E.g. in theory, Ian could avoid you entirely with his burst, but in practice the combination of him lacking the skill, lacking the strength to fully control the recoil, and you standing right in front of him resulting in a big thc penalty for him results in him hitting you with at least a couple of bullets is a given.

An extremely poorly aimed single shot would also potentially wind up anywhere on a wide cone, but the difference with a burst would be that some type of cone could be intentional. If you want to concentrate all your rounds on one target, and have the skill and strength to control them, then even a huge burst could theoretically hit that one target entirely, though with the same skill you could also aim for a wider area with multiple targets.

Anyway, maybe I missed your point somewhat.

edit: wait a sec, I'll put together something to make my idea more clear.

 

[Jaesun]

This is all getting very Prosperian.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Black is attacker, blue is the target and red are non-targets.

Any bullet fired would take any of these five "streams" forming the light grey area. The better aimed the shot, the more chance it will take a more center stream.

Now, as the bullet travels along the stream, and hits upon a critter, then there's a:
- Base chance of it being hit based on how far away it is (say, 20% if the target is one hex away, going down 1% for each subsequent hex). This is the absolute minimum chance.
- If it's a target, then the chance can rise if the shot is well aimed enough/the target's evasion is too low.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

This is all getting very Prosperian.

I'm actually surprised there's one or two people reading my obsessive ramblings. Wouldn't mind this thread being put in prosperland either, that way I don't have to be worried about getting prosperized all the time .

 

[Jaesun]

Naw it's fine being here. Though if you get Prosperized again, just PM me and I can move it.

It is rather interesting how fucking awesome this old engine is and the interesting stuff you can still do with it.

But if you start adding flyable mounts, then well..... you might need to take a break or something.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

But if you start adding flyable mounts, then well..... you might need to take a break or something.

Ah, so it's the youtube clips that are bothering you, not the walls of text? Or both?

The reason for the odd new energy weapon effects is mostly to offer some tactical options that the original ones, which essentially operate the exact same as ordinary pistols and rifles mechanically. I just had to come up with a way to make these different mechanics work animation-wise that wasn't too jarring, tho you might disagree.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I was talking to Jim about this in shoutbox, gonna post it here for further discussion.

I told him he should add a -AP effect when the game fires off a near miss bark. He said he didn't like the idea because with flat AP, it represents time instead of potential actions now. I replied this was fine as it's simulates spending a certain amount of time on your turn dodging bullets instead of acting.

Anyways, this would allow for suppression fire and should increase tactically I think.

I read up a bit on how this works in JA2, and I saw a lot of people complaining about how this involved (especially bursts) "stun-locking" characters in place. Like the emphasis on crouching behind cover, I just don't think this type of static gameplay would translate well to Fallout (or at least my vision of it ). Someone bursting all around (and on) you shouldn't force you in place, but incentivize you to gtfo, pronto.

To incentivize this, I would like to try something out that DraQ suggested a long time ago, namely separating out the act of aiming and firing AP-wise: it takes a lot of AP to properly position your minigun to start dispensing painless justice, but once you're in place, this dispensation proceeds rapidly. If the targets manage to escape the cone of death the next round, repositioning becomes necessary again, thus severely limiting the effectiveness.

I also saw that JA2 has more or less the same type of THC system I suggested above in the sense that every projectile that comes across a creature on its path always has a minimum amount of chance of hitting that (non-)target. The problem that produces that people complain about is that this causes a zero-skill full-auto attacker to usually score some hits purely by chance. I might be able to ameliorate this somewhat by making the cumulative THC-penalty from recoil cause the chance to go below the minimum, but not entirely sure.

At least JA2 differentiates between non-targets and targets: FO2 bursts don't take this into account at all, creating the obnoxious effect that Ian actually becomes more likely to accidentally burst you in the back if he has a good shot at someone, than if he doesn't. In fact he becomes a lot more likely to do this because of the round-robin system I mentioned: if he has 40% chance of hitting a target behind you with a 20 bullet burst, probably only 0 or 1 of those will hit you, but if he has an almost certain 95% of hitting his target, you'll probably soak up more than 10 of those.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

In other news, decided to give up on trying to make time a factor in the game. Would've been way too bothersome to balance anyway, especially with all the timeconsuming events in the vanilla game (reading books, training skills, etc.), and I'm not that big of a fan of time being a factor in my rpg's anyway (TB crpg's are nicely conducive to my mellow disposition ).

So, instead, here's what I was thinking. I already mentioned the upkeep bag thing earlier, which I still like: you place items/cash in it, and their value gets added to upkeep. Upkeep is the only thing that could possibly keep the economy interesting past the early game imo. Upkeep has three different components:

- Team morale. The less leadership skill you have, the more you need to keep your party members happy with a cut of the loot; otherwise they get demoralized, becoming less combat effective and more likely to sit a tough fight out hiding in cover. At 0 morale, they leave your party (the Charisma pm cap I've done away with; Charisma now affects how much they increase the skills you tell them to focus on).
- Equipment maintenance. This is essentially a very generalized weapon/armor repair system (I never liked micromanaging repair to begin with, and it isn't possible given Fallout's reliance on item prototypes rather than individual objects). Every time you attack with a weapon or you get hit on your armor, the upkeep cost for your equipment rises based on how valuable those items are. Neglect your equipment and weapons will critically fail more often and armor will get penetrated more easily. Different skills can mitigate these costs (science for energy weapons, repair for armor, etc.).
- Long-term healing. In a spin on the dual health system Sawyer put in PoE, I thought it might be interesting to have First Aid cover immediate healing (both in terms of HP and cripplings) only, whether during or after combat. Such healing, however, costs "Health", which can only be restored through upkeep (the costs of which are lowered through the Doctor skill). If you run out of health, your HP or cripplings can no longer be healed back. The difference between using quick fixes such as stimpaks and first aid in combat would be that stimpaks are quick, and independent from skill, but that they also cost more Health when used.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

More youtube vidz coming up to please my many fans.

First up is some intense grenade stuff. I remember reading somewhere that grenades in FO have wall bounces; well they don't (if you "miss" a critter standing right in front of a wall, the explosion just clips into the wall without hitting anything, which looks stupid). Now they bounce merrily. To help understand which hex you're aiming at, you can give yourself a preview of the path, as you'll see (I'm using some placeholder blood object for it, have to put some rudimentary art together for it, which I really don't feel like doing):



Next is molotovs, which really should work in a different way mechanically from grenades, so no shockwaves sending people flying. Sadly there's no real fire effects in FO, but I tried making a wavey cone that sort of behaves in that way (so when you throw the molotov against a wall, the flammable liquid "bounces" back):



Finally just another demo of the aiming aid, only now with a burst cone (the "flickering" is because all the blood objects have to be destroyed and rebuilt every time the cursor changes place):

S

 

[Jaesun]

This made me realize, I have NEVER used a molotov before...

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Does this destructible enviroment effect look somewhat serviceable?



With the extreme inflexibility of Fallout's map construction it's never going to look great and/or be widely applicable (e.g. I can't really do anything about roofs and tiles), but I'm so in love with the idea of a super mutant smashing the chosen one through a wall with his power fist that I felt it might be a fun addition. Plus with the AI hiding behind cover it'd be nice to be able to destroy said cover of course.

Anyway, I should leave all this fun effect stuff for what it is for now. So here's a rant on the aiming system I want to put in place:

Spoiler

A word on where I'm at with the THC formula in my head. And it's a doosey let me tell you. A real doosey.

I'm thinking of going all-in on simulated bullet-paths, which I'm convinced is the only way to bring both targets and non-targets under one and the same mechanical umbrella. I wouldn't do this out of simulationist concerns (as you'll see in a bit), but because I want there to be a relatively transparent system that ties everything together and which the player can adapt to easily. Not separate rules for bursts, single bullets and explosions that we have to trust to make sense, but ordnung.

Again, why is this important outside of my systemic fetish nobody cares about? Because otherwise you get what Fallout does, namely that as you become better at hitting an intended target in, e.g., a burst, you also become inexplicably more likely to hit an unintended target (say, a team mate). That's why I think there needs to be one unifying THC mechanic that accomodates all possible subjects, so that it all works more or less intuitively and the player can try and use it to his advantage consistently.

The idea would be that every time any projectile, and that means anything that could potentially damage a critter - whether it's a bullet or an explosion's shockwave - enters a critter's hex, there's a certainty that it hits. This is because the THC system would become entirely hex-based: if you hit a hex, you automatically hit everything on it as well. This THC isn't modified by anything: if a projectile and a critter are on the same hex, there's a collision.

So, for a critter to avoid getting hit, one of two things has to happen:

1. The projectile doesn't reach the critter's tile. This means the the projectile either has to have taken the wrong path, or have overshot or buried into the ground. Every projectile, even if overshot, buries into the ground eventually when it reaches the limit of its range. In what is the least intuitive part of this formula, overshooting becomes an important tool: if you want to hit a target standing behind a teammate, you don't want your projectile to pass through your teammate's hex to get there, so you need to "lob" the bullet over his head into the enemy.

Thus, the act of aiming completely changes: instead of shooting at a target, you shoot at a hex and everything on it. You then decide whether you want your projectile to neatly follow the path to its target, thus hitting anything on its way (best used for projectiles that pass through obstacles, like lasers), or whether you want to hit that enemy and that enemy alone, which involves a harder shot the more hexes you want to "skip".

Called shots are still a part of aiming, and involve a higher chance of hitting the targetted body part, but also of missing the targetted hex: shooting for the legs involves a higher chance of shooting into the ground (i.e. the hex in front of the target), for the arms it's one of the hexes next to the target, and for the head it's the hex behind the target (i.e. a higher chance of overshooting it).

2. The critter's not in the tile when the projectile gets there. Whenever a projectile does come into contact with the hex a critter is standing on, that critter will make an attempt to "escape" to the safest adjacent unoccupied tile temporarily (and play the dodge animation on a success). Of course, temporarily occupying this (relatively) safe tale could also result in the critter being damaged: standing close to the center of an explosion means that every adjacent tile will get hit with a shockwave, so there's simply no way of escaping it. The same goes for a burst that fires bullets into every adjacent hex: the best the critter can do is dodge towards the hex with the least amount of rounds present.

This seems to me to be something of a unified field theory of THC: everything is treated on the same mechanical basis, whether it's a bullet, a shockwave, a rocket or even a punch. There's also no longer the problem of differentiating between targets and non-targets, and attacking hexes or the objects standing on them.