Shoot & Scoot

[umbro]

It seems to me that shoot and scoot was not a very effective tactic pre-extreme assault. In general one was better off shooting until the defender was disrupted and overrunning, thereby capturing the enemy or pushing his LOS back and thus hiding your own forces. Thus, those extra APs were more often used to close and overrun not run away. However, extreme assault has had the (perhaps) unintended consequence of promoting tactics associated with direct fire effectiveness, and thus shoot and scoot is promoted.

However, to counter this unintended consequence with as minimal impact on other aspects of the game as possible could perhaps be achieved by changing opfire as below:
1) Instead of all SPs of a defender firing opfire at once only a portion do per opportunity (perhaps half)
2) the AP cost to opfire is calculated as (APs to fire)*(SPs firing)/(SP of unit)

In this way the total volume of opfire is not increased, but it becomes more difficult to drain opfire and predict when it will happen.

There are two effects:
1) Opfire becomes slightly less effective overall (because the attacker fires first his chance of inflicting loss or disruption on the defender before all the defender SPs have opfire is higher)
2) Shoot and scoot becomes less predictable as an attacker cannot know with certainty how much opfire face him.

umbro