I spent eight hours last night performing close to one hundred missions. Not once did any of my soldiers use reaction-fire. Aliens would run around in front of them at varying distances like Scooby-Doo in a hall of doors, and none of my soldiers would fire on them, even when they got shot at. Not with a machine gun, not with a pistol, not with a flamethrower, not with any rifle, not with a shotgun, not with a fox in a box with green eggs and ham, Sam I am. TUs for one shot, multiple shots, all TUs available... nothing at all.
Meanwhile I'd land a combat site and there would be an alien facing towards my men getting out of their Firebird. No matter who I would move or what that man would do, the alien would fire relentlessly on one of the soldiers it could see, inevitably killing him/her without a chance to save them or fight back, shooting at the next the moment that man dropped until the alien's TUs ran out. If any others saw my men, they too would shoot, creating a very ugly crossfire and a frustrated click on the "Retry" button. Typically the soldier they'd be targeting would be the one with the rocket launcher or sniper rifle and they missed horribly despite being proficient in rating with their weapon, so putting a stop to the shooting frenzy in one or two shots was rarely an option - for some reason rockets and sniper rifles have become horribly inaccurate weapons that do little damage (what happened to the head shot option, by the way?).
I thought maybe it was coded to match "X-Com: Enemy Unknown's" RF rules, in which soldiers would sometimes(rarely) shoot at moving enemies, while the aliens would fire at moving objects much more frequently. It was around mission 40 that I noticed my men had not fired a single reaction shot at all and there were very blatant points where three or four of my soldiers would be massed for an ambush and a Taman would walk right into their kill zone - surely one of them would have taken a shot. This happened again and again and my soldiers would be like mannequins in a mall, being shot at and never reacting.
The aliens have no problem with their RF working. Player's soldiers, however, need it turned back on. Standard, Easy, Very Easy - all three of these difficulty levels seemed the same. The combats became very difficult, even on the easiest setting, as I had to adapt new tactics as I could no longer use RF to assist my squads' movements through the battlefield. At the start when all the aliens had were kerrblades and plasma grenades, it wasn't so bad, but once they got plasma rifles it became ridiculously difficult to approach them and kill them before I lost my men to extremely accurate, extremely long range reaction fire and normal fire. I don't think the solution is to reduce the accuracy on reaction fire, but rather to re-enable it for the player's forces. I can handle the challenge of the aliens' accuracy, as long as my men have the fair advantage of shooting at them as they move around too. Reaction Fire makes a huge difference and while I enjoyed 2.2.1's very frequent RF rate, I could learn to adapt to a less frequent rate after the no reaction experience I've recently had.
If there is a method to turn it back on by manipulating the source code we have, I'm all ears.
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While this is unrelated to the RF topic, it is relevant to tweaking. The research seems to have been slowed WAY down. It's taking a long time even with two bases and seventy scientists split between them just to get the early tech out of the way. If possible, I think it would be a good idea to make the starting(human) tech choices research fairly quickly (I spent over three months just developing laser pistols and DF cartridges!) and leaving the alien technologies around the current rate, possibly tweaked slightly lower on some stuff like plasma weaponry, slightly higher on more advanced topics like UFOs... just an idea.
Hoping to hear back on a fix for the RF thing. Keep up the good work - I'm eager to see what gets done with 2.4!
