Caltrops - Mischief Maker's Maker's Mark





	[quote name="Bananadine"][quote name="fabio"]In this and Laser Squad's case, only a small part of it is actual squad tactics. The vast majority of your planning revolves around fussing over the overly precise order of operations when you spot an enemy. You're not so much ordering soldiers as setting up behavior scripts for robots to follow.[/quote] But scripting robots is what I want to do! My problem with this game, when I had a problem, was something else: I felt like I <i>could</i> plan around whatever uncertainty would arise once the turn execution began, if I really wanted to, but in some situations it would just take too long to be worth the briefly entertaining automated scene that would result. Because a lot of the time you can get by with being super-conservative, always considering the worst few things the enemy could do and making sure you won't be hurt if any of those things were to actually happen; and accounting for all those possibilities without a friendly and reliable way to simulate the turn is boring. But Frozen Synapse's simulation is reliable. You might not always understand why the enemy machine gunner hits yours right away after yours fires three times and misses--but if the simulation tells you that that will happen, then it or something very much like it will indeed happen (according to my experience), and adding or removing a tiny delay in your unit's script, or shimmying the unit's movement path or aiming direction trivially, will rarely if ever produce any significant change. When I played the campaign, I used the conservative strategy above, and it worked well despite my ignorance of many of the rules, and was fun enough for me (until they made the simulation unreliable by adding fog of war--which, thankfully, you can easily avoid in multiplayer).[/quote]