The AI knows exactly where to move to get a clear line of sight on your guys, but you have no idea yourself where you need to go to get a bead on someone. Atleast not in any way I have found. This is rather horrible when you're outnumbered and trying to do your best to get out, they will find you no matter where you hide. I really dislike this, if they can't see me they shouldn't be able to know where to go to get a shot on you.

Yes it's unfortunate that the game doesn't take a note from XCOM on this and provide LOS preview.

They are shooting my operatives across a whole building, with no line of sight, through a wall, some boxes and a full cover.

Hi, we've been getting a lot of feedback of this kind and are already working on ways to make the AI somewhat less knowledgeable and the player a tad more.

Sadly with issues like this it was hard for us to anticipate how players will react. Many of us have been expert players of this game for a long time and such AI behaviour is not giving us a hard time at all - and there's always the risk of making the game too easy by "fixing" such things. But we'll figure something out.

Stay tuned.

As I posted in another thread: you could keep your original vision of the game and everyone happy as well, if you added new gameplay elements (such as RNG, LOS, respawn etc. settings) as optional, user-selectable game rules.

Thanks.

so, are you saying that the cover system is working as expected and walls and distance are also working as intended?
I see these as issue of design rather than "it was hard for us to anticipate how players will react".

I suppose the modding community will have to fix those issues if that is your answer.

Yeah, looking forward to upcoming changes to this. Right now I don't really want to play thanks to it, but I really like everything else and I am definately not giving up on the game!

I honestly have no idea where you're getting this from, considering that OP's post and my answer were about the AI.

Whatever you guys are going to do to "fix" this - please make sure it's optional.
There are still people (humble me included) that have no problem with the opposing side having the edge over your own operatives most of the time.

It`s not about the enemy having an edge; it`s about the enemy having an illogical advantage. A game has to get across a `fair` mechanic that makes sense to the player. If the opponent is breaking the rules of the game world, the player will not believe it, be unimmersed or invested and will stop playing/paying for it.

Fair enough.

It's just that during my playthrough I never experienced the described situations and thus never felt being treated "unfair" or anything so far. If some random guard got a lucky/skilled shot on one of my guys/girls from the other side of the mission area (with clear line of sight of course), then I just accepted it as exactly that - a lucky/skilled shot from the other side of the mission area. Tough luck.

Why shouldn't the opposing side also just so happen to have one or two eagle-eyed shots in their team who are also quite good at anticipating the position of your operatives?

If that's not what Creative Forge wants the game to be they have of course every right to "fix" it.
It just would be nice if as much of the "fixing" as possible could be rolled into options. Doesn't hurt having options, does it?

Assuming that you're referring to how we designed this game: God no, there's probably not a single studio in the world where everyone agrees with each other on such matters and we also did get external feedback long before release. I myself was initially a big opponent of certain mechanics in this game and reacted much like you guys, as did some others on the team. What convinced us that the mechanics are good was the experience we amassed over a longer time with the game as well as the external feedback we got which was surprisingly positive, better than some opinions on our own team, in fact. So it appeared that this unconventional philosophy is not as controversial as it had seemed and that we could rather safely reap the benefits of this system in spite of some initial scepticism. Obviously many consumers, including you guys here, had a very different opinion on these mechanics than any people who got to play the game in advance so now we're evaluating this feedback and working out improvements.

And the "getting used to a system" thing you mention is actually a very complicated matter. Sometimes you just get used to a flawed system, sometimes a system that seems flawed at first is actually good once you've wrapped your head around it. We've basically been playing the game for almost two years, so we got used to certain solutions and developed the corresponding tactics - the game is rather easy to us and the fact that the correct tactics work differently than in other games is at first glance a massive plus to us.

The fact that we can easily finish many encounters that give new players a hard time and even frustrates them puts us in a tough position: will those guys change their opinion eventually, just like we did? What about the guys who like the game the way it is? Can we make more players happy without sacrificing some of our original solutions? It's really not as simple as you make it appear.

However, some things are admittedly botched and we're very busy making changes to many things. First off: I do not condone shouting down a critical voice like yours. As far as I'm concerned you raised legitimate concerns if you expressed scepticism of our shooting mechanics. As I said: so did many people on the team including myself.

Secondly: the thing is that shots can and do miss, much like in Hard West, and whoever from our team may have ever said that there's no "misses" in this game, made a big mistake in my opinion. Mechanically a "dodged" shot is identical to a "miss" in Hard West but for various reasons the naming convention was inverted from "miss" to "dodge" which has, as far as I can tell, brought quite a few problems.

Mechanically the biggest difference is that this time we also have graze shots and I think that's a highly controversial aspect that may need adjustment. That kind of optional feature has actually been on our list of potential post-release additions for a while so fingers crossed. Thank you. And I'm sure you will highly appreciate our upcoming updates which address many of the problems you mention.

Thankyou too. I do appreciate your reasoned and honest responses. I do not see this often as some Devs of other companies can be quite bad when it comes to critical players. I may seem a little rude or harsh, that is not my intention, I`m just forthright in how I speak. You`re doing a good job of changing my view of you guys.

I`ll keep my eyes open and watch for the results. I hope they will do justice.

The step-out mechanics in this game aren't actually entirely dissimilar from the ones in the first XCOM reboot game. However I strongly believe there are some LOS bugs present in the game as well such as shooting through stairs in particular. At least physically from a real world perspective I've had situations in game where I can exchange fire with the enemy and even with stepping out of both parties it would require The Matrix physics to be possible.