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.
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.
The region perk for a bonus ally was a complete waste of a perk slot, and even if you had no others the actual performance would be so bad you were asking for shit to go wrong.
Baseline stats, so they would fail to hit anything. Baseline gear, so even if you were rocking T3 guns and gear you'd find yourself with maybe a T2 groupie that was never going to do much vs all the armour and hp late game brought with it. Even just the shitty grenades they had were pointless as frags had shit shredding, shit damage, and shit aoe.
I'd take any other perk over those if I could, even the ones for stupid shit like sending lightly injured soldiers into combat, which I'd never do in the first place!
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.