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.
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.