The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
Oh gods the hit probability was just such an irritating mechanism; you could practically have your gun’s muzzle on an alien’s forehead and still manage to miss several times with 80% chance to hit.
People say that’s just the true odds but I really don’t think that’s the case. Even if I use the c++ old and flawed Rand function, rolling 2d10 almost always gives me at least one roll above 2. So in 2 shots at least one should hit. Even in the newest xcom I remember rolling 6 shots with 90% and missing all of them. 8 feel like XCOM has something broken or influencing it outside of percentage.
Yeah those odds-beating misses at least felt like they happened way too often, and I’m pretty sure the percentage really wasn’t a “raw” probability but that there was some other fuckery also involved.
Sure, it’s definitely statistically possible to miss a few 90% shots in a row, but eg. there’s a 0.0001% chance of missing 6 in a row at 90% – and it’s not like shit like that only happened once on a blue moon in XCOM
The internet is also littered with these types of studies: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/191291-xcom-2/79589841 where someone went through and calculated up some scores and hit well below the standard deviation for shots.
Where would be the fun w/o a missed shot from your shotgun when standing right next to the alien? ;-)