If I may? A classic:
I think the game is meant to abstract away simultaneous actions. So it’s like the alien and you are moving at the same time, not like hitting a stationary target next to you.
But still, missing those 99% hits like this hurt.
To be fair. Is pretty difficult to hit someone with a longgun at such close range.
Way too close for even a bullpup rifle. 65% is honestly pretty good if he’s already at point-blank range by the time brain impulse to fire the trigger is sent.
For every 100 shots you take with a 99% chance to hit you will miss around once. I think the max hit chance was capped at 95% from memory too but I could be wrong.
I’m still re loading that save though.
i don’t know how xcom does it, but if you are reloading a save, it is possible that you are always using the same random number generator, so the results would not change
I think that was an option you could enable for your playthrough where it would use a consistent seed. You could get around it still by taking a different action first to use up the bad roll before trying again though.
At least in war of the chosen, the seeds for the round are static. Idk if there was a way to turn it off, but by default they used it to nerf save scumming. So if you know you’re going to miss and you want to bother with save scumming you can at least try a different tactic instead of going over and over hoping to eventually hit.
Honestly, just get a mod that buffs your hit chance like the rest of us sore losers lol
I’m Battle for Wesnoth, after clearing a map it showed a statistic about how lucky you’d been in your dice rolls. Which really meant how often you’d rerun dice rolls by saving and loading. When it said something like “370% above average luck”, I realized that, oh shit, the game knows?!
“Save scum” is an optional Second Wave option; you can opt in or out either way. I think by default it preserves the RNG on reload.
Save scumming is such a staple of modern XCOM that it’s actually a toggle. Just like when I was save scumming in fire emblem, you can probably just mutate the seed differently by taking different actions before attacking though.
Random seed is how xcom (and any other program) does it.
I want to say the devs admitted that they increased the reported chance to hit in the first nu xcom because people refused to take a sixty or seventy percent shot.
End result? No 95 will ever hit.
Made worse in nu xcom because shooting generally ends your turn and leaves you open to retaliation - sixty percent shot implies forty percent chance of death, and death of an experienced trooper is extremely bad. Old xcom, you could duck out of cover, take a shot, and duck back in, so “bad” chances to hit aren’t such a problem.
Which leads to my other part of the problem with nu xcom. The original, you could load fourteen dipshits into the skyranger and they could all take their 14% shots; if half of them came back alive, then it’s promotions all round. A meat grinder for sure, but the loss of a couple of soldiers isn’t a disaster - your fault for sending your most experienced guys first through the door if it is. The new one requires exceedingly cautious play and luck. Nothing like as bad as Phoenix Point, of course, but spoiled it a bit for me.
Tactics is choosing who to send in first. Strategy is being able to recover if that goes wrong. Nu Xcom is all tactics and not enough strategy.
I kind of like the nu XCOM approach though and I get the reason for the change. It’s way less accessible when every turn around and step deducts time units and you have to do the math in your head before moving so you don’t end up stuck in the open with no time to shoot. (Forgetting the cost of turning a guy or crouching leaving me unable to shoot has cost me a fair number of chumps). There are a lot of skills in WotC and LWotC that still let you move shoot move too.
That said Xenonauts 2 is a good split of the difference for both of them
I go back and forth on it, but the main difference was that nu xcom was made in a way that learned from the mistakes of olde. Like you said, we all just sacrificed hundreds of newbies to the RNG gods until we had enough veterans for the important missions. Same with only ever attacking when we were more or less safe from consequences. It led to a very weird approach where it was increasingly obvious xcom (the org) only cared about the “named units” and screw everyone else. And any relation between that and real world militaries is purely coincidental.
Nu xcom was made with that in mind. There was a focused effort on making each individual soldier “matter”. It was less “Oh no, we got lit up like a landing boat on D-Day. Ah well, grab their gear” and more “Shit. That sniper has 1 HP left. I need to protect her so that I have her later”. Which… turned basically anything that wasn’t a terror mission into a giant mess of overwatch hell. And that is why nu-2 had the god awful turn counts (and 1’s DLC added the resource that expires).
And I would very much argue the opposite regarding your tactics/strategy distinction. nu is all about thinking about the long game. Because that Assaulter that just got got? That might mean you are sending rookies in a desperate attempt to not lose a nation. Which means it becomes all about how you play “on the ground” to survive.
I forget what game it was, but I remember a REALLY good interview with a developer for one of the modern squad games who talked about this (I want to say it was on 3 Moves Ahead?). He was completely aware of how so many games in the genre were about fielding five snipers and one sacrificial grunt. And that is what led to various special abilities and so forth to make every single class viable outside of the scripted missions where you are fighting a god damned panzerklein in a single room with no cover.
All that said: Fuck nu xcom for its cover system. It is so fricking annoying to figure out if the angle to an enemy means I want to have west or north cover…
The expansion was wild. Initially the cenobites-alike trio mopped the floor with my guys but I got to a place where my team was made of demigods.
The max cap is 100% but the game uses floating point numbers while only showing the player a whole number after rounding up. A 100% chance to hit is anywhere between 99.5% and 100%.
There are mods that just make the UI show the actual percentage to hit.
I’m gonna take this opportunity to plug Phoenix Point, an XCOM clone by the original creators of XCOM. It’s definitely not as polished as XCOM EU and XCOM 2, but its targeting system feels a lot less bullshit: you get to manually aim with two concentric circular reticles. There’s a 100% chance that all projectiles fired will land within the outer reticle, and a 50% chance of any projectile fired to land within the inner one. Though this does mean that you’ll never miss a properly aimed point blank shot from one tile away.
Besides that, there’s also a lot more to do in the geoscape section of the game than in XCOM 2.
I would like to see a game that calculates the distance to the target, the wind speed and direction, and the mechanical accuracy of the rifle, and the adjust the bullet trajectory accordingly. E.g. an AR-15 should have a mechanical accuracy of about 2-3 MOA on average, and usually has a 50/200 zero (e.g., your optic is zeroed at 50 yards, and height over bore means that you’ll hit slightly below your point of aim at less than 50 yards, above your point of aim between 50 and 200 yards, and then below after 200). So you should have to aim, say, about 24" high on a target that’s 400y away, but then your point of impact is anywhere within about a 12" diameter circle. 7.62x39mm in an AK? You get a 25/200 zero, 4 MOA mechanical accuracy, and at 400y you have to aim 46" high.
Oh, and calculate velocity for realistic time to impact, and actual damage; at 600y, a 5.56 is doing to be stopped by pretty light body armor with minimal injury.
Essentially I’d like a game to force people to understand real-world ballistics and performance, and adjust their strategies accordingly.
Just play Arma with Ace installed. Already has all that and more
Does anyone really play Arma, or does one person build a mission, and then everyone fucks around until that person gets frustrated and stop trying to direct anything?
Just go play Operation Harsh Doorstop, it is free (community funded free not microtransaction casino “free”), runs a million times better, has vehicles and support for large maps and is moddable!
(including support for players downloading a server’s mods on connection so players only have to click on a server to try out a new gamemode or mod)
I constantly praise this game and it is because of the crazy potential of it, it’s accessibility and the fact that the foundation is already awesome.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/
Or check out Easy Red 2 for realistic WW2 battles and easy and useful controls for giving orders to AI teammates.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1324780/Easy_Red_2
(it it is usually around $9)
Arma 3 did this like 10 years ago.
They also considered thing like the speed of sound, stars in the sky and other stuff i don’t quite remember. I wonder if they simulate bullet drift from the earth spinning.
That’s a real thing at extreme-long-distance shooting, but not really an issue at realistic engagement distances for small arms. E.g., if you were doing a King Of 2 Miles simulation, you’d want to account for it, or an artillery sim, but probably not for infantry engagements.
I also want the player to slow down if they get pegged in the legs. If they get hit in the arm your accuracy falls or you have to do it one armed and your accuracy really drops. If you get hit in the chest there should be at least a couple seconds where your stunned or your accuracy drops.
TBH, most of those would simply knock you out of the fight for all practical purposes, except being hit in the chest or back in areas fully covered by armor. A rifle bullet through your shoulder can be fatal quickly without being able to pack the wound, and you won’t be able to use that arm at all if your scapula has been hit. ANY solid hit with a rifle is going to be a very, very bad time for you.
To put it in context, armor only covers the places on your torso where a hit will cause near instant death.
Well that’s kind of what I want. Although unfortunately this has been tried to be accomplished in the past and it was non-viable.
Like I want it to be realistic… But 98% of gamers don’t
Oddly enough Hell Divers 2 does this…which nobody would call realistic in any other way.
Helldivers 2 has a super interesting damage model. You can really notice it with a sniper rifle against the bots. You can knock off so many parts of their body.
Hotdogs horseshoes and handgrenades does all of this.
Doesn’t Tarkov model this somewhat correctly ? (Save for the wind not affecting bullets, and the optics zeroing/distance setting being a bit too arcade-y)
Nah the hackers don’t follow these rules
Except the bullets come out of the player’s eyes, not the gun.
That’s what’s shown for Rainbow 6.
The bullets also come out of the players eyes in Counter Strike. I don’t know how it is in the other games.
As far as i know only tarkov works otherwise.
This is why I hated re4 remake
I could never stand the way recoil works in counterstrike, in any other system your crosshair is moved around and its intutative to compensate for recoil, in counterstrike you just have to memorise the pattern in which the bullets come out of the barrel sideways.
An elegant algorithm, from a more civilized age.
Lisp is fun, and recursion can be slick. it is hard to read though!
Not true. Players who memorize the spray pattern choose to turn off the dynamic crosshair. By default it is pretty standard with other games.
That’s actually an option you can turn on.
i’m missing ARMA here
Take Battlefield’s, but add a few more arcs as the bullet bounces.
I need to try Arma again. I love the concept, but with all the complicated controls it felt like a marriage between Battlefield and QWOP.
and then there’s Fallout 3 & NV, where low skill points in Small Guns makes bullets bend away from the crosshair
And your gun sways all over the place. Worse in 3, your character just moves their neck forward instead of using the sights when aiming. That just magically makes the bullets spread less despite not actually aiming… thank fuck for Tale of Two Wastelands.
Eh, Battlefield has crazy bloom (their version of deviation) on most guns except the SMG. The kind where you can stand 6 feet in front of a player and full auto a magazine at them and only hit them once or twice. Been an issue with BF forever. Even the SMGs suck with increasing range. Unfortunately there’s a glut of players exploiting Aim Assist with hardware, so far too many laser beam kills at 60+ meters with full auto tiny guns.
Idk what BF you’ve last played but BF1, BFV and 2042 have crazy accurate DMRs that are piss easy to use even at sniper ranges.
Also no need for aim assist to control the smgs with how little recoil they have anyways, with a bit of practice you’ll hit most of your mag at 60m+
LMG sniping represent
I hate those advansys snipers. Damn.
DMR’s are fine. No complaints there, Aim assist doesn’t help much in that class. There’s a definite difference in people using aim assist on SMG and not. I’ve got almost 2k hours in game and it’s really, really obvious when there’s aim assist abuse vs not. Doesn’t matter which weapon. Zero bloom vs some bloom on full auto. Rapid no-miss taps with DMR, etc. You really rarely encounter this stuff in big map modes like Rush or Conquest, it’s nowhere near as obvious thanks to the greater distances, but I play a fair bit of TDM and people abusing the aim assist feature stand out like sore thumbs.
I play on pc so aim assist isn’t really something I encounter a lot outside obvious cheaters, but aim assist in general isn’t something that should exists outside of singleplayer imo.
I’m on PC too, and yeah…I’m not a fan of aim assist at all. M&K are just as available on consoles for this game as they are on a PC.
Meanwhile cod is a straight line at 500+ meters with an smg
Well yes, SMG means Sniper-Mega-Gun
Needs one for Halo where the bullet does go to the target but it doesn’t originate from the weapon barrel. lol
Are we pretending this wasn’t an issue in the previous XCOM: Enemy Unknown? Or is it just that much worse in 2?
Also I don’t know which of these is the most ridiculous. Maybe R6.
Shoutout to the original STALKER games for having good ballistics.
Part of the issue is there’s a disconnect from what’s being shown and what’s already happened. So, XCOM, and I think XCOM2 (it’s been a while since I played both) create a table with “random” values on map load. This means, you can 100% save scum the shit out any encounter because cause and effect will always be the same, it’s not a live “dice roll”. Part of this sucks, because what happened is hidden from the player. Something like BG3, you can see “Oh, I swung, rolled a 3, and these modifiers, my total was 14 and they have an AC of 15”. Also, some games help by using a pseudo-random where the probability of something happening, actually increases over time. Example would be Dota2, where something like bash, shows a given percent, but it’s actually on a scale. Each attack changes the % chance the next bash may happen, eventually getting to a point it’s nearly a guarantee. This type of random is often used to make the game feel more fun for the player (to nudge the numbers one way or the other). However, with a pre-seeded table, this likely isn’t happening.
Then you add the visual component. Point blank range, it’ll say “99%” and you miss. Or the number will seem low, despite point blank range. And you have the visual of the %.
So you add those together, the game likely not helping the player and just using a pre-seeded table plus the visuals with the human notion of really only remembering the extremes and you get the overall feeling of “game not fair”. You made 10 shots in a row with only 30% chance, but you only remember the single 99% chance you missed
That’s probably the best explanation I’ve seen, thanks.
cause and effect will always be the same
Actually no. Mostly, but some actions affect the PRNG and when loading saves they haven’t remembered to reset the effect of those, so the results can change a bit between loads. It has been a while, so I don’t remember the specifics. But you can abuse this property to get out of really tough spots by gaming the PRNG across loads.
I have probably save scummed too much.
It’s never really been an “issue”. The rolls have always been accurate, and the XCOM devs have even said in XCOM 2 they gave an invisible “buff” on hit chances on some difficulties.
The problem is we as people assume that something like 90% is a guarantee, and a miss in XCOM always feels so much worse, especially when they changed from time units to just a flat “do a shot, hit or miss them all” approach. So even though statistically you’re going to miss 1 of every 10 on a 90% shot, when it happens twice it’s “bullshit”. But that’s just odds man, gamblers fallacy is real.
Is Stalker 2 worse, do you know? Thinking of getting it.
I haven’t tried it yet, that’s why I didn’t mention it. Hopefully it’s the same!
I hate the PRNG of XCOMs. For anyone suffering from that I recommend Hard West. It’s a buggy game, but the luck mechanism is interesting. Basically when missing, your luck increases, and eventually that helps you hit. So missing a good shot isn’t that bad, because you can build a strategy on it regardless.
Basically when missing, your luck increases, and eventually that helps you hit
XCOM 2 has that same mechanic, in case you didn’t know. It’s just not advertised to the player. So this is purely psychological on your end :P
How many years of luck increases do you need in XCOM 2 not to miss a 99 % shot?
Seriously though, do you have any good sources to read about this?
Not really I’m afraid, it’s been many years since I was playing Xcom and reading these articles.
Yeah, the deepstate definitely rigged those guns
If you want this image to be more accurate, put the alien head right next to the muzzle.
