X-Com 1 and 2 (new versions) are great games, even if they moved away from the large squad slaughter that was Enemy Unknown, terror from the deep and partially Apocalypse. I personally really enjoyed looking at black sections of the map and thinking "that will cost 3 rookies to explore"
Everyone is aware of the "95% to hit meme" around X-Com, and if you've played Phoenix Point, the difference is especially jarring. If you haven't, aiming in that game is purely a probability cone, so standing point blank next to an alien means something. In X-Com it doesn't mean diddly squat.
I finally figured out what the problem with X-Com is, and why it's always uniquely frustrating. With it's pod based mechanics, fake stealth and drip fed enemies. What you are seeing on screen has no relevance and only serves as a distraction. Being right next to an Alien and missing is irrelevant because where the character and alien are on screen do not correlate with the game.
X-Com is, for all intents and purposes a very fun card battle game. If it were a Dos prompt game, with exactly 0 visuals, nothing would be lost.
Try it next time you play, completely ignore the visuals and imagine your character as a card drawing a dice based attack against another card.
Those % to hit chances are all effected by the location of your character in relation to them. The Flanking bonus alone takes impossible shots and makes them near guaranteed. Standing point blank to the enemy means a whole lot, and anyone whose ever actually played the game knows it. Everything visual is relevant under that umbrella and disproves your entire point. If you want to drag it to pedantic, literally every game could do without visuals and just be a number on the screen and accomplish the same thing.
The problem with the "95% chance to hit" meme is that its brought on by lack of information. There are a lot of pure raw numbers going on behind the scenes to make that final one, and often times your starting units just literally lack a high enough number even with every advantage multiplier to get to 100%. The game doesn't explain its own mechanics other than a vague notion that is good enough but leaves you with a lot of those Xcom Moments of confusion when they happen.
But that's why the most popular mod for the game was a literal higher difficulty, more complexity one. Because once you have access to more information the game becomes a lot more manageable and predictable to a point of needing more difficulty to return the challenge.
Both of the new Xcoms are littered with issues, like the retarded stealth and pod mechanics, but the RNG to hit thing isn't are egregious as it seems once you actually understand what its calculating and how to work within it (grenades bandaid everything).
I've played the literal Card Battle game that Firaxis made after Xcom 2 (Midnight Sun) and it plays nothing like Xcom.
And even if RNG were really bad, part of the fun/challenge of tactics games like XCOM is making a plan, and then having a plan to deal with if/when the first plan falls apart. It's a management game. And, just like in something like RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress, much of the !FUN! comes from managing those absurd and chaotic situations where everything goes to absolute shit.
I like missing high percentage shots, because it makes you think more and manage the new and more challenging situation. A string of bad luck can lead to some of the most fun gameplay, and the most memorable stories.
I've missed a 100% shot before, back in Long War 1, due to mod number rounding. I remember it a decade later, because that was hilarious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-iNE6zv90
There's also the point that 100% just means your chance of hitting, a mob can still dodge if the numbers are close enough and reduce your hit to "Grazed" doing only partial damage in later games.
Thin Mints from EU/EW and Sneks from XC2 were similar in that regards as both were
snakesagile fuckers.As the game shipped, overwatch watch so overpower, I usually got the fuckers. They kill a lot of dudes tho.
Also true, but the kind of people to complain about "le 95% miss" are the people who don't understand that to begin with so I skipped saying it.
The game gives you risky situations that you have to take, and then deal with the consequences of. There are ways to remove the risk (explosives) but that comes with a cost of materials or cover for yourself depending on the game. Higher difficulties teach you that those removals are the biggest part of early game strategy to a point of minimal actual firing for a time.
A comparison in a similar genre. Fire Emblem 6 and 7. 6 is notorious for its extremely low hit rates across the board, which means its incredible difficulty is one of its most remembered parts and it makes sure you have to engage with the game with both barrels at all times without a lot of fluffs. 7 on the other hand (as well as every later game) increases the hit rate to be basically 100% on most enemies who aren't specifically designed with dodge and it turns the game into far more of a slugging match of raw attrition where the difficulty comes from adding extra layers (skills, reinforcements) instead of number on number.
Not to mention both Fire Emblem and Xcom are designed with the idea of regular loss of soldiers and needing to replace them with lesser versions, so the loss is part of the intended process. Anyone whose played Xcom through without losing soldiers or having to Abandon missions should know how fucking easy the endgame is with how strong you are.
I won't say I like missing high % shots, but I've found that the people who complain about it endlessly are usually just bad at the game and trying to brute force everything and getting fucked on that. Especially as Xcom is probably the easiest to save scum of any in the genre.
It turns out, most people have no understanding of probability. A 5% chance to miss is the same as rolling a nat 1 in DnD. If you have a group of 12 aliens/monsters and each one takes around 2 hits to kill, then you are going to have a 70% chance of 1 or more misses.
It's the same thing with Rimworld. A horde of Mechanoids firing at your pawns, even with a <1% chance to hit, will hit that pawn simply due to the law of large numbers.
A gamer's goal is to ALWAYS reduce the randomness, so that the fewest rolls necessary take place.
That wonderful moment in the TLP DLC where you realise there is no loot to worry about and suddenly grenade spam is back on the menu. 💥
Especially in 2 where turtling forever doesn't work due to the various timers which mean you need to play aggressive. Overwatch kill boxes worked too well in earlier games.
Even understanding why the hit rates are the way they are, it doesn't align anywhere close with reality. An elite commando unit, that misses shots that are only yards away, or even point blank, it just pure frustration. It doesn't make logical sense, unless the characters you're controlling are untrained retards with the worst vision on the planet. No amount of "but we need it for gameplay balance" will overcome that disalignment with reality and reason.
That type of gameplay makes the player realize that the gameplay revolves around babysitting retards that couldn't tie their shoes without somehow dying horribly (oops, the 99% chance you had to succeed somehow rolled a negative crit, causing the shoelaces to somehow pierce the brain and kill your character, and the character behind him). That type of gameplay logic occurs in many more games than just X-Com, too, and is why I no longer play them. It's a souring experience.
What X-Com is trying to present to you is a simplified (& cinematic-fied) turn-based version of a chaotic battlefield. The overhead grid map with near-perfect visibility is a bad way to actually conceive of the combats. Instead you should be thinking about the first-person shaky-cam, night-vision version where your guy is mostly hiding behind cover or running flat-out into a dark building, only to see a grotesque alien waiting for him around the corner.
In real combats something like 99+% of "shots" won't actually result in a hit on target, even with elite soldiers. X-Com if anything is overstating how accurate soldiers in real firefights are.
I agree, to an extent. I'm not saying experienced special forces are perfect aimbots. But still, the game contradicts itself in that regard, which is why the "95% chance to hit" is so memed on. The dice rolls are not reflective of the information you're given. It would be better if the game gave you accurate percentages according to how they calculate it, which is just another layer of frustration in these games. It's obvious that the percentages given to the player aren't accurate. Also, I can't tell you how many times my characters had perfect shots lined up, on enemies that were in wide open terrain, with no obstacles or other impedances, at very close ranges, and they missed, over and over and over and over, even with automatic weapons.
This, in turn, forces another layer of frustration on the player, to save and reload countless times, just to not be screwed over by the game's dice rolls. And in harder fights, this has to be done multiple times, just so you're not gimped in subsequent fights by being perpetually worn down by attrition and undermanned, or staffed with noob troops with low stats, because your better troops kept getting sacrificed to bullshit RNG. It feels unfair, because it is.
The retarded part is that they clearly want your starter soldiers to be random retards barely out of Boot, but for story reasons they are supposed to be Elites already. Its one thing Xcom 2 does better. In that random Guerilla fighters make a lot more sense than the World's Best like Xcom 1 had. I won't defend it though because its a terrible integration of Narrative and Gameplay.
I like how Alien Dark Descent did it a lot better. Where the accuracy level is effected by their increasing fear/stress levels and you have actual control of accessing that risk and working to minimize it so you don't spiral out of control.
Apart from all the friendlies you "team up" with during Retaliation missions that are determined to plink every single alien possible which means you end up with a billion Codex clones, enraged Muton Berserkers, and perma-shelled Gatekeepers. 🙄
Its amazing how they managed to turn reinforcements, which provide completely free meatshields and extra damage, into a bad thing.
My personal "head-canon" as it were is that the nations backing XCOM started sending their soldiers that were not great and then claiming they are elite. It would certainly fit with the lore about how the XCOM Project was close to getting shut down as it seemed like something that didnt have a purpose anymore (which is why you are starting with pretty minimal facilities).
This shit happened way too much so I modded "Elite Mercs" and "Combat Veterans" as recruitable soldiers.
Was it any good though? It's finally trending towards a decent sale and I've been considering it. (Lot's of other games I'm still more likely to pick up though.)
I really enjoyed my time with it. It being a Card Battler that isn't roguelike lets you build towards strategies you enjoy and get synergy going that you understand how to exploit. Which leads to most battles feeling closer to a Puzzle than anything, as there is nearly 0 RNG (except for certain characters/cards explicitly made for it).
And for a lot of characters, its actually lets you feel the Power Fantasy each of them should bring. Spiderman runs circles around everything and laughs at how slow they are. Ironman overcompensates by trying to do everything himself and ends up just dominating the battlefield with missles. Venom just walks up and fucking bricks people. A legitimately good integration where every characters fights like it feels like they should narratively.
The biggest problem being that the game suffers from the same issue Xcom 2 had, where Jake Solomon is still pissed about Overwatch spam so he designed the game to operate on Triple Speed. Which means a lot of characters like Captain America or Deadpool, who are built for defense and building up end up very weak or near useless.
Its got an annoying Tumblr girl as a major character, but the morality system means you can literally tell her to shutup and fuck off everytime she opens her mouth. And since she is one of the worst characters period (the one who has RNG on every ability) you don't even lose much by doing so.
Its got a small tacked on overworld, but unless you play on the top difficulties you don't need to even interact with it as it just gives crafting mats for consumables and some costumes.
The Ultimate All DLC Edition (worth it for the additional characters like Venom and Deadpool) is usually under 20$ and a first playthrough got me a good 50 hours where I was having legitimate fun doing random missions, so I say its better than it has any right to be given its a Modern Marvel product.
Awesome, thanks for that detailed response. I'll keep an eye on the sales.
The game also had errors making the display wrong.