Turn friendly fire off?

[Cougarific]

Forgive me for starting a new thread on this, I did Search Discussions but didn't find anything beyond "git gud".

Just a personal preference, I don't like playing with friendly fire active, it breaks my immersion when my highly-trained soldiers can't fire on an enemy without hitting their own guys.

This is especially a problem when breaching crashed ships - you're often forced to advance in close formation and I end up leaving half my guys outside the ship because I know if I don't it will be a friendly-fire bloodbath.

I'm not looking for tactical advice, just a mod or file alteration that removes friendly fire - any suggestions?

[Haeres Corvi]

I know you said you weren't looking for tactical advices but you might not know this mechanics: when advancing in closed formation, make the soldier in front crouch before those right behind him shoot; they will then be able to shoot over him just like they would with a cover.

As for turning down friendly fire, I have no knowledge of anything like that existing - neither as an option nor as a mod.

[GramboStorm]

The soldier can only be as good as the commander.

Watch your formations, try to keep your fire lanes clear.
And as mentioned in the comment above, a soldier standing behind another soldier who is crouching can shoot over them.

But in terms of file alteration, I'm pretty sure it's not possible, as everything in the game, terrain, enemies and your own men are all objects which can be damaged by a projectile.

Besides, wouldn't no friendly fire ruin immersion even more?

[Cougarific]

Originally posted by GramboStorm:

Besides, wouldn't no friendly fire ruin immersion even more?

To each his own, personally I like to think my highly-trained soldiers would know not to pull the trigger if one of their comrades is standing right in front of them blocking their shot. Pretty sure that's the first thing they teach you when you join the military: Don't shoot your own guys in the back.

I've rage-quit more over friendly-fire incidents than anything else. A game mechanic that makes you want to stop playing every time it happens is IMHO a bad game mechanic, or at least something we should have the option to toggle On/Off.

[Bob of Mage]

If you look at the line that goes from the shooter to the traget when selecting shots you can see if some one or something is in the line of fire. If they aren't in it then you shouldn't be able to hit them unless you are using something like a machine gun at long range, in which case there's a good chance for you to hit a friendly that's in the rather large cone of fire.

One other thing that's easy to miss when you first start playing is that you can make aimed shots instead of just using snap shots. Right click and it will change the type of shot being used. Took me a while to firgare out, and make marksmen rifles so much better.

[Vandal Savant]

I can only imagine the real issue at hand is reaction fire horribly backfiring. I've never heard of a mod that made the situations for it behave more sophisticated, so a machinegunner behind some troops doesn't mow 2 people down from trying to kill a light drone playing peekaboo.

The most that can be done is preemptively turning troops around or dropping their gun -- which costs no TU. You can pick it back up the next turn.