Take Cover!
Battlescape Fighting Tactics - Using Terrain Features
X-Com agents on the battlescape can use the various objects scattered around the landscape to act as a barrier to:
- hide behind, to limit expose to enemy fire.
- running between soft-cover in a weaving zig-zag to confuse homing projectiles by increasing the chance they hit something in the way.
Cover
Anything on the battlescape can be used to shield your agent in a fire-fight. Some things are more effective than others.
Soft Cover
A terrain feature which is a weak barrier to incoming fire and explosives. Soft cover typically only survives one impact before being destroyed or losing its effectiveness as cover:
- Trees alive and dead.
- Building rubble.
- Furniture.
- Glass walls.
- Derelict old-style vehicles.
- Down pipes.
- Support struts.
- Alien devices within UFOs.
- Unconscious (not dead) entities.
Some soft-cover features may not hide an agent very well, if at all.
Hard Cover
A terrain feature which is a strong barrier to incoming fire and explosives. Hard cover typically survives multiple impacts before being destroyed or losing its effectiveness as cover:
- Multi-layer thick walls.
- UFO hulls.
- Undulating landscapes.
Some hard cover features may be multiple sections of soft-cover features stacked together. eg: walls may contain multiple-tiles-thick sections, but each piece making up the wall could be destroyed with one strong impact.
Visual Cover
A type of temporary cover which only blocks line-of-sight. It does not absorb any impacts.
- Grey smoke.
- Stun gas.
- Alien gas.
No Cover
A moving (run in a zig-zag) target or a smaller (crawling) target is harder to hit.