4101

After reading a few reports, I wonder if the patch fixes anything at all.
More troubling is their apparent inability to fix the teleporting bug which to me looks like a confirmation that the hidden alien movement system is affected by bad design rather than a simple glitch.

If they can’t deal with alien movement under the fog without the teleport cheat in pre-built maps, I imagine having random battefields is totally out of the question and maybe the reason why they weren’t included in the first place.

4102

Classic not focussing on engineers and satellites?? That is the only strategy that has me emerge victorious.

4103

There is no other path to victory, is there? The strategic layer isn’t very interesting as a result.

4104

This is exactly why I uninstalled the game after maybe 6 hours of play. It happened occasionally/rarely in the original XCOM. It happens ALL THE TIME in this game.

4105

I’d love to see something like a custom game option!

In the meantime, a couple mods out there (I’m not sure if they’ve been updated to work with the latest version of XCOM) let you play classic difficulty without the crit and aim bonuses for the alien side in the tactical layer. Everything else about classic is kept the same.

Someone disassembled the RNG and found that it doesn’t cheat: http://www.schwanenlied.me/yawning/XCOM/XCOMPRNG.html

So you were probably just unlucky.

4106

Mel Brooks: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

The equivalent rule for game development is: When a player rolls well and kills a monster against the odds, it’s clearly because of the player’s innate awesomenes. When a monster rolls well and kills a player, it’s clearly because the game is a cheating broken piece of crap.

4107

/Jag likes this post.

4108

However, when your squad clears out a room and has both entrances covered but an alien still manages to teleport into the center of the room, then yes the game is a cheating broken piece of crap.

The latest patch just “minimises this” :)

4109

Well, whatever the reason may be, the RNG DOES have a tendency to result in extreme numbers, i.e. 95% or 3%.

I don’t want to repeat my rant about how I loathe the fact that the RNG seed is stored in savegames, but one thing that does allow is reloading and trying to do different things with the same “base value”.
In other words, the game rolls 5 with the current seed - this 5 is used for the next action.
Shooting some alien with the shotgun at point blank with one soldier uses the 5, shooting a different (or the same, doesn’t matter) alien with the sniper gun at 94% to hit uses it just the same.

As I already pledged guilty of occasional save-scumming, by doing so I too often ran into situations where the roll was so extreme that not even taking a shot at >90% to hit would result in a hit.
In fact, I don’t think I was ever able to “turn around” a miss-roll by simply shooting with someone else, but my sample size wasn’t huge, either - I merely save scummed a couple of times when I didn’t want to replay an entire UFO or something like this, not all the time.

That said, I think here it’s a “problem” that most things are equal in XCOM.
I.e., unless you use one of the special game options, every lvl 5 sniper with the same perks picked is exactly the same, no?
So is every alien of a specific type with a specific weapon.

How was it in the original X-Com? At least your soldiers had very variable stats (which were trainable), so you often had folks with so high skills you KNEW you could rely on them (almost guaranteed hit), and you could plan accordingly. I don’t currently remember if the aliens had randomized stats as well…

rezaf

4110

Same for me. I’d love a split between the difficulty of the tactical squad game and that of the strategic overview.

4111

But if you missed with one guy, you already know that the number is less that his to-hit value, so that actually limits the possibilities significantly. I.e. P(X< hitPct2) | X < hitPct1 is different from P(X<hitPct2).

If you wanted to test it, you’d probably want to set up a situation where you have a range of probabilities, and re-test a single value with each of them, starting with the lowest, until you get a hit.

4112

What? 1% of the time it will roll a 3. Is that too often?

4113

The link I posted makes clear that the RNG does not have a tendency to result in extreme numbers. The histograms show a relatively even distribution. Unless I’m interpreting those charts incorrectly.

I’m also glad that the game keeps the seed as a measure against savescumming; reloading to retry a miss until you get a hit breaks the game. I don’t think the designer has any obligation to balance the game for players intentionally circumventing its rules. In fact, Ironman really should be the default mode and the toggleable option should be called “Allow cheating.” (I’m being a little hyperbolic, yes!)

Put another way, if you were playing a board game with a friend, and you rolled poorly, why should you be allowed to reroll until you get the desired result? Wouldn’t you be cheating your friend? And then what would be the point of having fail states at all or even consequences? Video games, though, let us do that all the time. I guess it’s no big deal when you’re cheating a computer and not another person, heh.

Anyway, this is a little beside the point. You just got unlucky. XCOM’s problems have little to do with its RNG.

4114

True enough - except I wasn’t exactly taking a scientific approach back then.
I only scummed in maybe half a dozen situations, and in some of those I hadn’t even discovered how to get the more detailed combat info summary.

Of course this theoretical “limit” isn’t too often - but I’m not sure the game actually works like that.
I read the RNG dissection long before it was linked a few posts above (someone posted the same link on the official forums), but there’s lots of things that could theoretically still break the to-hit calculation. Wrongly introduced modifiers for armor, weapons, cover, other modifiers … whatever.
Of course this is pure speculation on my part - it’s entirely possible everything works as intended. My experience is annectodal (sp?).
However, I seem to recall the game had different problems with floating point values not working as intended, and there’s some pretty … noteworthy bugs STILL not fixed after months, so maybe there are problems here as well?
Maybe, maybe not.

I also think the “steamlined” approach to armor values plays a role here.
Didn’t armor in X-Com work by blocking damage?
In XCOM, higher armored targets are harder to hit (wtf?) and have more hits. This leads to the strange situations that your highly trained combat personnel cannot hit a barnyard (muton) at point blank - they miss because the enemy is heavily armored.
Of course the end result is no different whether my shot misses or is absorbed by the armor somehow, but it does slightly damage the suspension of disbelief for me.

That all said, besides the seed stored in savegame, I didn’t really have many problems with the RNG.
Small squad plus huge alien superiority meant you had to play in a careful way (if you wanted to be successful, read: survive) that could be annoying and sorta torpedoed the hiding of all the mechanics behind a curtain to speed up things, imo, but that’s about it.

Edit:

I agree, with the caveeats above.

Fair enough, I’d be fine with Ironman being standard and the option that doesn’t store the seed being called “allow cheating”.
I just look at it this way: You don’t lose ANYTHING if the seed is not stored and you never save-scumm anyway.
Whilst if, for whatever reason (such as not wanting to replay an entire 5 hour tunnel ufo mission), I WANT to save-scumm, I can’t, because the designer preferred to erect a “no scumming” shield that’s there for no really good reason. There is no “cheating allowed” option.
I like scharmers idea of a custom difficulty setting, like in the old Dynamix flight sims. Don’t want to bother with fuel? Just disable it!

Exactly, since I don’t regard the computer/AI “my friend”. It’s just an algorithm.
To counter your example from the opposite direction, when I was in my teens, a couple of friends and me would occasionally meet up to play Monopoly. When someone ran into a stroke of bad luck early on - which would have booted him ten minutes in from a game which might take hours, we came up with all kinds of house rules to allow people to keep participating. We broke the rules of Monopoly in order to have more fun.
Why shouldn’t a computer game allow the same? I just want to have some hours of fun when I play a game, I don’t want to be Jake Solomon’s bitch.
Clearly a personality fault on my part.

An actual possibility, I’ll admit that.

rezaf

4115

I mentioned this a while back in the thread, but it’s an intentional design made to promote feast-or-famine in damage, in order to keep lethality high. If you have a unit that does 10 damage with 40% to-hit, you could normalize that to 4 damage per hit with the same effective damage value. Armor that reduces this by -2 damage vs. -20% to-hit, have the same effect in the long run: reduce the expected value of hitting the enemy to 2 damage per shot.

There are some edge cases where on a particular enemy may have 3 HP, so it’s the difference between killing in one hit or 2, so it’s not exactly the same, but roughly speaking. Also, reducing the squad size emphasizes this because you get less chances to drift towards the mean in a single round.

But, if you implement it as damage mitigation, it’s less exciting because you basically always know that you get 2 damage, so no tension on each hit. If you know it will take, on average, 2 hits to kill an enemy, you can implement it this way, but create more of a jackpot-scenario.

As for modeling hit / miss vs. armor absorbing 100% of the blow, that’s just a visual thing, and missing makes the effect clearer.

4116

Oh, I get that it was an intentional design decision.
And while it slightly bothers me, it’s not one I’d go out of my way to complain about.
I think the different approaches are more different than you give them credit for, though.
If I have a shotgun type weapon that’s basically guaranteed to hit (at close range) but the armor will then absorb half the damage, that’s quite different from a weapon that’ll only hit half of the time but then do full damage.
At least it’s quite different to me, but maybe I’m just looking at this wrong.

rezaf

4117

Oh yeah, I’m absolutely over-simplifying for illustrative effect.

4118

It is different. Before armor, lets say a weapon does 6 points of damage.

If armor just makes it harder to hit, the weapon will average some amount of damage over time unless it reduces the chance to hit to 0. Maybe this can be overcome by a skilled shot with a high hit rate.

If armor reduces the damage, lets say by 6 points, the above weapon doesn’t do any damage ever. Maybe there are some weapons that can negate the effects of armor to bypass the effect. This method just feels better. If you throw a tennis ball at someones head and they aren’t wearing any protection, its gonna hurt. Put that person in a football helmet (with a face guard with small openings) and that tennis ball isn’t ever going to hurt their head - unless you launch it out of a cannon.

So with the second method armor is better at rendering certain weapons harmless. You can achieve the same effect with a big reduction to accuracy but it doesn’t feel quite the same. With some number tweaking (attack accuracy, armor accuracy reduction, weapon damage, etc) you could probably make roughly equivalent systems.

4119

That’s pretty cool.

I never thought it was being too lucky, I thought that they made the aliens too good. It appeared as though an average early game alien had a much higher chance to hit than my soldiers. Is there some way of seeing the aliens’ hit chances like you can see them for your own soldiers?

In a mirrored fight, both sides behind half cover. Obv. shot distances are the same, since no one is moving. I had my five soldiers shoot at an alien. One two point hit. The hit probabilities were all around 45-65%, so obv. not an issue. The alien hits. Ok, still not an issue. Now all my soldiers miss. The alien hits. Repeat this two more times, except fewer shots since I lost two soldiers. Yeah, I can tell I’m unlucky since I can trust that number. But I’m guessing the alien has a better than 65% chance to hit given the results.

This sort of firefight did not happen in isolation. It happened regularly. Probably every few battles would yield a situation like this.

I’m VERY familiar with how probability works and how unlucky streaks work. I see the RNG making that happen, which is great, you don’t want a completely uniform distribution over a small number of rolls. But it just looked to me like aliens behind cover across the map were given huge accuracy bonuses. AND FUCK THAT. It pissed me off. I uninstalled the game.

Edit: To be fair, a number of other issues I had with the game also led to me uninstalling. Let’s just say this game was not a GotY contender for me like it was for so many of you.

4120

That’s actually hilarious. Nothing to do with what I was talking about, but I’m going to file this one away next time I’m playing a board game with someone and they won’t shut up about bad rolls.