UFO: Enemy Unknown, remake by Firaxis

sherbz said:

As i found out to my cost recently . Ran where i thought it was safe and ended up tripping another group. Assault flanked, dead assault .

I think that with all things xcom, you need a good balance of attack and defend. And the game will actually punish you if you are excessive in either. The skill comes in knowing when to attack and when to defend. If you just hide behind full cover and take pot shots at floaters, this can be a bad tactic. Because if a pack of 4 seekers then arrives then it can turn your day rather sour. i think its most pronounced in exalt missions actually, especially when you are limited to just 4 soldiers. On maps where you can get 19 exalts, you have to be incredibly aggressive and kill as many as you possibly can in as quick a time as possible. Long war exalt maps are tough. You need your best soldiers with the most fire power. I usually find a shiv is essential, plus a mech with flame thrower for crowd control, plus a gunner with either rapid fire or double tap, plus either a rocketeer, assault, or infantry.

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and the game still punishes you with rage-quit inducing nonsense like missing on a 98% shotgun to the face on your assault's run-and-gun and he's killed during the AI's turns. the RNG is just nonsense most of the time, even when it's to my benefit (like critting on very low % shots). i wish tactics werent punished by extreme luck.

Hammer Rabbi said:

and the game still punishes you with rage-quit inducing nonsense like missing on a 98% shotgun to the face on your assault's run-and-gun and he's killed during the AI's turns. the RNG is just nonsense most of the time, even when it's to my benefit (like critting on very low % shots). i wish tactics werent punished by extreme luck.

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I always liked the random improbabilities... does seem to happen a bit too often in XCOM, but having the possibility that a poor shooter (for example) score a crit on an alien at max range gives a bit of a realistic flavor to it. If every time a shot was at 99%, while great while in your favor, hit its target, it would get rather stale. Its like rolling a natural 20 or 1 in D&D. Adds that slim possibility which could leave a bit of hope when things seem dire.

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Hammer Rabbi said:

and the game still punishes you with rage-quit inducing nonsense like missing on a 98% shotgun to the face on your assault's run-and-gun and he's killed during the AI's turns. the RNG is just nonsense most of the time, even when it's to my benefit (like critting on very low % shots). i wish tactics werent punished by extreme luck.

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Yea i mean i dont really get this type of argument. 99% is a one in one hundred chance that you will miss. This mirrors real life IMO. There are times when people who are so reliable at activity "X" will, on a very rare occasion, mess it up.

Goes back to the point that you always need a plan B in X Com. Only having plan A is a sure fire way to oblivion. If your tactic is to expect that every shot thats 95%+ should always hit, then that in itself is not a good tactic and deserves to be punished.

sherbz said:

Yea i mean i dont really get this type of argument. 99% is a one in one hundred chance that you will miss. This mirrors real life IMO. There are times when people who are so reliable at activity "X" will, on a very rare occasion, mess it up.

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thats funny, ive never understood why players cant see how bad the RNG is. there isn't a logical explanation for a point-blank shotgun shot with no obstacles not to be a 100% shot (just to hit, not crit). but the game prevents that with their specific method of RNG which is the problem, not the concept itself of missing on 99%. i get that things sometimes misfire. it should indeed be "very rare". but 10+ times in any given playthru is not "very rare". twice in one mission isnt either. i did not even take 1000 shots over the course of a playthru, let alone the statistically acceptable amount of actual 95-99% shots to justify them. the RNG is a joke.

Goes back to the point that you always need a plan B in X Com. Only having plan A is a sure fire way to oblivion. If your tactic is to expect that every shot thats 95%+ should always hit, then that in itself is not a good tactic and deserves to be punished.

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no, it does not deserve to be punished. your conclusion has absolutely nothing to do with how xcom rewards/punishes strategy with randomness. and the problem has nothing to do with planning. their RNG system is what's awful. it is why you cant trust what any of the percentages actually are. and how can your individual movements not be impacted by trying for higher percentage shots by using terrain, movement, new skill sets, etc? those percentages decided my reason for even wanting to take a move/shot/etc in the first place. maybe it makes it easier to accept that it was for "flavor" reasons or that it could have been avoided/prevented/accounted for with "better" tactics but this issue has NOTHING to do with any of that. at least they gave you some adv. options to try to account for this (if you want to re-roll turns ad nauseum, which is no fun too).

the only way ive gotten around this (for the most part) is going with a Heavy-centric team. Rocket splash damage is flatly applied. more often i can trust this composition to not issue Miracle-grade mistakes that make absolutely no sense. MEC/gene mods were briefly entertaining derivations for combat but not interesting enough to do another playthru just to see how they all work. once was plenty. youtube videos showed me the stuff that i didnt need to play to find out about.

sadly, these details are why this game does not have longevity with me. i only played it thru completely 3 times, twice with EU, once more with EW and each time i was really bored by the end. i did several starts in hopes of staying interested for the whole thing. i even planned out future games playing with every continent start, trying MadDjinn's SHIV strategy, trying a MEC only and a Gene Only playthru, etc. but i found that building my base was more entertaining than the actual combat missions. and that stuff was mostly finished after 3 months with still some more connect-the-dots missions to do. so that means on to another game that's more entertaining.

ive tried to give it more times to 'get better' but for players like me, TBS has no room for these kinds of 'flavor' randomness that remove me from enjoying the game (and to some degree immersion for a game not relying on immersion). i gave it almost 200 hours but wish it had been half that. it took 50 of those hours for me just to learn why it sucks. i was coasting off it being a long-overdue continuance of the franchise but the charm wore off quickly.

My attitude about the use of RNG in XCOM...

In general, I like it. But I wish they capped the extremes. If you know there is a 99% chance that an attack will succeed, the correct decision is to make that attack. There's no deeper strategy of weighing risk and reward; in basically every situation, 99% is treated the same as 100% tactically (assuming, of course, that you face some non-zero risk by ending the turn, and there's no way to make that 99% into a 100% this turn).

I'm not talking about realism or real life; that's fine if you're making an alien-invasion-training-simulator, but this is a game. I'm talking about playability and fun. There's no purpose served by having extreme results every now and then royally f*** up a mission that you played correctly (or, conversely, save a mission that you absolutely misplayed and should have lost). It doesn't make for deeper strategy. It doesn't add to replayability. It doesn't enhance immersion. It doesn't do anything but piss players off.

Results with more than 95% chance of hitting should always hit. And results with less than 5% chance of hitting should always miss. It gives the human a little more wiggle room for tactical planning without "rocks fall, everybody dies."

It's not 95% then, is it? It's 100%. There's no point in having a percentage scale if it's straight-out lying to you.

Arakhor said:

It's not 95% then, is it? It's 100%. There's no point in having a percentage scale if it's straight-out lying to you.

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I agree with this. Maybe at lower difficulties you could do it. But on at least classic what you see is what you should get.

A far more annoying thing IMO is when your troops panic. And im not talking about just panicking and hunkering down, or firing off a few shots, or even running away. Im talking about when your assault panics and blows your snipers face off. They should change it slightly so that when panicking, your soldier either runs away or hunkers down. You could add random shooting though as a psionic skill. Give sectoids the ability to use the power "frenzy" for instance. Whereby your soldier shoots randomly in a 360 degree arc. Most of this problem only exists in vanilla. It was nerfed considerably in enemy within and is almost non existent in long war.

Arakhor said:

It's not 95% then, is it? It's 100%. There's no point in having a percentage scale if it's straight-out lying to you.

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it is already straight-out lying to you. if it's going to lie, at least not make it so bad to want to play other games entirely. i know some have no problem with this, but these kinds of things are deal-breakers for me.

Then you have two solutions - either change the RNG or stop playing the game.

I see some leftover Civ4 RNG angst in the crowd here

Arakhor said:

Then you have two solutions - either change the RNG or stop playing the game.

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hehe, i solved that dilemma already. it's all good.

Arakhor said:

It's not 95% then, is it? It's 100%. There's no point in having a percentage scale if it's straight-out lying to you.

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Right. So display 5% to 95% normally. If your odds calculate to >95%, it displays 100% and your odds are 100% If your odds are <5%, display 0% and have 0%. No lying involved. This is not rocket science.

Where do you stop, though? If 95.5% is actually 100%, people will complain that 95% should definitely have hit, because it's "only" 0.5% away from a certain hit. All you're doing with that sort of thing is just shifting the goalposts and not actually fixing either problem (the vagaries of the RNG or people's understanding of probability).

There are two ways people complain.

1. "This was so close to being guaranteed, it's irritating it wasn't."
2. "This was so likely to work, it's irritating that it didn't."

The two are similar, but not the same. You are assuming that I suggest capping it due to the first... but it is the second one I feel should be addressed with a tweak to how the odds work. You need to make those judgements all the time on things like 90, 95% shots - where there is a very noticeable risk of failure.

The more extreme the possibility, the less impact it has on your strategy (because it's so unlikely) and the more irritating it is when it does come up with a fluky result.

So... 50% chance to hit, 50% chance to miss shot: it's good to have RNG. It forces the player to think carefully about the reward of hitting vs. the risk of missing. 80% / 20%... still good, but not as much so. Now you don't have to think quite as carefully about what might happen if you miss. 95%/5%... in most circumstances, the optimal play here is the same as if it was 100%/0%. 99.9%/100.0%... now it is just getting silly. There is no way a human is going to turn down a 99.9% chance shot because of that 0.1% chance of missing.

Somewhere in there is a changeover point, where the value added by including a random chance of missing is less than the irritating cost to the player of sometimes killing them against all odds despite their doing everything right. Maybe it's at 95% (I picked that number as a first guess, but you'd probably want a group of testers to play around with it). Maybe it's at 90%, maybe it's at 99%. But there is one changeover point, below which random chance makes sense but above which it does not. Capping the extremes does make sense for those who enjoy the game because of the tactical depth it provides.

So in the 95% rule, if the odds were 94%, then the game would display 94% right? And 95% upwards would all be 100%? Similarly, less than 5% would instead read as zero. I could see that working. It wouldnt really affect gameplay and would stop all this nonsense of people complaining about shots that should have hit. The cynic in me though suggests that those people would then complain that their 94% shot missed.

I wonder at what point the AI decides that its chances to hit are too low. Ive never seen it shoot at hunkered down soldiers behind high cover (although there is rarely much point in hunkering down behind high cover). I have seen it shoot at soldiers in low cover, hunkered down and in smoke though.