Breach and Clear

[Agm76]

Would love to be able to mitigate the running blind into a room I suspect or know is infested with aliens.
I know its been suggested before but to have another grenade option of a flash-bang would be so fun.
I imagine crouching next to a door or a created hole (from my plasma rifle) in a window or wall, throw in flash-bang.
It goes off at end of round like a primed grenade on 0. Alien activity occurs, and the next round for me I can enter. Only stuns for 1 round. Any aliens/civilians that were facing the grenade, and are susceptible are standing motionless or are panicked.
Id want the benefit of the doubt to go to the alien, I don't want to overpower them. If they are too far away or facing the other way it has a very limited effect. What do you think?

[Qpoter]

I like the idea of what is pretty much a "mini stun bomb". Wonder how hard it'd be to implement direction-based damage reception (as in, if not looking at blast, not affected)?

Would also be interesting if you had no way to really tell if they were stunned (as in by not turning affected units into corpses), to both balance the flashbang's effects and still preserve some element of risk in clearing rooms.

Perhaps it would not have a guaranteed chance to work either, depending on the alien type, rank, whatever, or maybe just plain chance would determine it.

[BobTheBreaker]

That sounds like a pretty cool concept, but...
WARNING: CURMUDGEONLY SPEECH FOLLOWS
Giving more advantages to X-Com may not be the best move. The Aliens have no way to counteract it, and adding things like this could screw them over entirely (not to mention removing the tension from the breaching phase). Another problem is that stun damage doesn't really work that way. Although, I recall that Warboy made a mod back in 0.4 that had flashbangs. IIRC, they took away alien TUs.

[Arpia]

if stun damage was modded to shed off reactions for that turn... you could could make a weak stun bomb as a flash bang.

[Qpoter]

Doesn't have to be stun damage in the traditional sense, just something that'd stop reaction fire.

I like the idea of a flashbang because if you open a door and there is an alien ready w/ reaction fire on the other side, it's almost guaranteed you'll be hit.

Like I said, I'd rather this 'flashbang' not be a sure-fire way to clear a room without taking fire. Either it wouldn't fully drain TUs or be based on chance, preferrably the former. To expand on my previous post, the earlier aliens would be less resistant to "Flash" damage, while later (more potent) units would be nearly immune to the standard X-COM flashbang.

New flashbang types could be researched as, say, derivatives of the Small Launcher projectiles.

[Warboy1982]

as i recall, when i did flashbangs i made it affect reaction and accuracy scores for (n) turns, where n was a random number between 1 and 3.
with this number at 1, stats were reduced by 1/3, and at 2 or above reduced by 1/2.

as for checking if a target is looking at the explosion, there's a handy little function called IsInViewSector() that uses math to determine if a unit is looking in the direction of a given tile, combine that with a simple line trace to verify the alien has an unobstructed view of the detonation and it practically writes itself.