Most squad based games have an interrupt feature that works as follows:
- During your turn you can arrange it that some of your soldiers don't use up all their action points - leaving enough APs for a "reflex shot" and facing them in the direction of the expected enemy assault.
- Then during the enemy's turn, if an enemy soldier moves within the range of you soldier it may, or may not trigger an "interrupt".
- If the interrupt triggers, then the enemy's turn is interrupted and it becomes your turn temporally, you can shoot at the enemy, or do any other action until your APs run out, then the enemy's turn continues.
The problem with this is that the interrupt only triggers, based on a random throw of the die (that is for the case of the original X-Com game and Jagged Alliance 2). When you position your soldier for the interrupt, you are putting him in a vulnerable position and if the interrupt doesn't happen (because the random die throw), then your soldier is almost certainly going to get pummelled.
For that reason when I was playing X-Com, I almost never tried to get interrupts, because I didn't like the idea of my soldier randomly getting shot to pieces based on a die throw that was completely unpredictable.
So, for Merc Tactics I have being working on ways of "solving" this problem. This is how it works:
- There is no die throw, instead there is a "counter" which starts at number depending on the soldiers interrupt skill.
- During the enemies turn each time an enemy moves within the soldiers arc of fire the counter goes down by one. When the counter reaches "0" the interrupt is triggered.
In the screen shot below, for example, you see an arc of fire drawn on the ground with the number "3". 3 is the number of times that the enemy can move within that arc before the interrupt is triggered.
Now the interrupt is triggered:
Once the soldier shoots or moves the counter goes back to the original setting, otherwise it holds it's value. So, if the counter didn't hit zero in the first turn, you could keep the soldier where he is and try to get the interrupt in the second turn.
This scheme removes the random element and provides feedback to the player, so they always know the likelihood of an interrupt occurring.
Nice, yeah, the problem with the X-coms, Jagged Aliance, and Xenonauts was always the complete lack of knowledge. Even a percentage chance being displayed would've been better than nothing. XCOM, the remake, swapped it to always happening, but only once, and every single person would respond at once, making it mostly useless. (Especially combined with it's lack of unit facings)
Your method sounds fairly clever. Is it the number of action points spent, or the number of tiles moved? I could see advantages in both methods.