Snapshots reserve the same number of time units as full automatic, but when normally firing, they consume more. This is a bug, as there is no reason to ever use anything but the most powerful type of reaction fire. There needs to be some sort of tradeoff.
I can not reproduce this (in current code at least, didn't try the 2.1 version yet - what version are you using?).
The current way how Reaction Fire
should work is like this: 7TUs (or 14TUs for multiple RF) are used up from the round it has been activated (and any following round - because it's auto-activated) and the actual shooting costs the normal amount of TUs the selected firemode of the weapon requires (this effectively removes them from your next round).
So to summarize: Tradeoff = 7 or 14 TUs for activation
additional to the used up TUs by the weapon.
But as BTAxis mentioned already this far from the best way to do it - main problem is that the code is most ungrateful so nobody really wants to dig in and actually do it (myself included
). But it has to be done - the sooner the better. There are some very thorough proposals in the wiki (EDIT: see e.g.
Gameplay Proposals/ReactionFireBlueprint) and the forum about this already.
EDIT: I've actually tried to reduce the 2 proposals in that link to their core-statements (for coders) some time ago but never finished it. Will do that when I've got some extra spare-time again.
BTAxis: Especially the 2 method (the UFO:EU one) is what I'm aiming for, but if more people would like the first method (which I doubt) ... we'll see
Werner