I noticed that among the modders from time to time the theme about the balance of flying armor and suggestions for new types of movement pops up. In my opinion, the possibility of free-floating for the player has too much influence on the balance of some mods, which places a strong focus on melee combat (for example, missions with monsters in XCF).
I would like to discuss the possibility of adding a third type of movement to the game along with walking and flying - jumping. For most gameplay moments, this type will be considered as walking (for example, when we select the node for unit spawning, jumping unit should spawn on walking nodes).
Essentially, this type can be something in between the two existing movement types, I would imagine playing for a unit with the jumping armor this way. When we select a point to move, we cannot select a tile that has no floor (just like the walking type). So we can't finish the movement by jumping in a floating state. However, the route can pass through a tile without a floor, as it does if the unit can fly. At the same time, the unit cannot stop in the middle of the movement, being in a floating state. For example, a unit will not stop if it spotted a new threat (as it does sprint). If the unit is forced to stop (for example, a player presses the stop button - RMB, or we encounter other circumstances when the unit can't continue with the planned movement - it falls down because it can't stay floating (like walking type does it). And you can't make a jump if the unit doesn't have enough TU to finish the jump and finish it on a tile that has a floor. Maybe we would ask the player to hold some buttons like Ctrl or Alt to make sure he or she wants to define jumping trajectory, to handle most cases where the game would perform pathfinding not right.
It would also be good to take the cost of traveling in the jump to the armor properties so that you can set the cost of resources for each tile passed in the jump - for example, that it would require more TU, and would not consume energy; or that the jump also uses mana, and so on.
I understand that this is a pretty ambitious project, and I haven't covered all of the problematic cases that can arise, and it's also a noticeable complication of the current solution. But in my opinion, it would significantly expand the gameplay and could be in demand in many mods, so I would like to discuss it. Maybe somebody has already considered this idea or even considered its implementation in code, I would be very interested to know about it.
