Had the following happen in a recent battle:
- Used IR, found a solitary alien (Taman, IIRC; it's fairly early, haven't seen anybody but Tamans and Ortnoks) in a farmhouse. He's facing a soldier that I have on the other side of the wall (fine, infravision; it's safe, with no windows or doorways on that side).
- Ran a soldier into the farmhouse point-blank range right behind the alien. Four shots with a laser rifle showing 100%. Each shot appears to hit the right tile, but alien (somewhat unusually for a Taman; if he was wearing anything heavier than medium armor, it wasn't captured afterwards) does *not* go down.
- On its turn, the Taman does... nothing. No attempt to escape, doesn't fire a weapon. Which is lucky for the soldier, but unexpected.
- Soldier promptly kills the Taman with the next shot.
Is it that the alien was losing TUs with each hit and therefore not able to respond? Could the alien have somehow expended all its firepower earlier? Alien resigned to the idea that it was simply a good day to die? Or was this an AI glitch?
It wasn't really clear to me whether I was somehow missing a target w/o cover in an adjacent square, whether the laser rifle just has highly variable damage, whether the armor was absorbing it all, or whether I'd actually burned through the armor and left a nearly dead, probably massively bleeding/screaming alien right in front of me. I can definitely understand (and support) not showing reports like "alien Blah hit, -25 HP" or the like -- and in other situations it can definitely be unclear whether you hit at all -- but with such visibility here, some feedback on whether the alien appears to be laserproof and angry vs. almost dead seems appropriate.
