[V23.5 Ground combat] Unfair hit chances

[thixotrop]

Ground combat of UFO crash site (not downed by me), took ist slow, covering all angles.
Worked well, killed 3 aliens (Psyons) without problems, the reply fire was normal.

Then as if a button was clicked, every shot of the aliens one-hitted a soldier, lost 5 Soldiers in one turn by 3 aliens.
WTF?
Soldiers were always behind cover.
After that, nearly no soldier could hit normally anymore. Morale was still unchanged, I checked. Lost two more.
Once inside the UFO the last alien suppressed by my heavy the shotgunner walked in and missed two times point blank *sigh*. Sniper at 45° angle with 100% hit chance on alien killed my shotgunner who stood next to the alien, not in front not behind...

This problem reminds me heavily on Xenonauts1 where this happend as well.
Game breaking for me!

 

From same misson, after the "event" above and after deaths that lowered morale.
What hinders shooting/aiming?
Clear line of sight, shoot path all green, can`t shoot unless forced by pressing STRG (or ALT, can`t remember). Yeah and misses for sure. *sigh*

Edit: Ok, I must admit the last steps of path are red. But forced shooting shot at least hit the target a bit. With heavy and rifle that works mostly, not great but at least they do a bit of damage.

Had this with shotgunner, see below, and also with heavy and riflemen.

 

Other mission
I can`t shoot because 100 block chance, why can the enemy hit me without moving?
See here:

 

 

Edit due to errors and a bit of insight.

 

 

Edited May 14, 2022 by thixotrop

[Emily_F]

I totally agree with this post. It's super frustrating when you're stood next to a target, switch to full auto, and none of the rounds hit. Also the point about being able fire around cover is valid and has been an issue for a while I think (I'm sure I remember a discussion about it from like V19).

[Chris]

While I do understand the frustration of randomness, in 99.9% of cases where people are annoyed that their shots don't hit, it's just the random number generator working correctly. Sometimes the AI rolls a sequence of high numbers and you roll a sequence of low numbers because of randomness. It's selection bias; people only notice it when it goes badly for them.

There's no "fix" for this except to add cheats like in XCOM where a 75% shot is actually a 90% shot, and an 80% shot is actually a 100% shot, etc (and lots of fans were furious that XCOM was secretly doing that). I guess we can think about adding something like that if that's what people want but I kinda feel like people should be clear what they're asking for with that.

It does sound like there are some actual bugs in your game, though. There should be no way a 100% shot can hit anything other than the intended target. A save game and logs would be great if that happens again (even taken after the shot), so I can see the locations of the units and check out what might have happened. There's a thread on where to find logs and saves here.

The same is true for any example of asymmetric shooting. That shouldn't be possible. I can do a bit of testing at my end based on the screenshots but it might not affect every corner so a save game is way more useful than a screenshot.

What you're seeing with the shotgun having 0% accuracy there is the weapon being out of range. The path turns red when accuracy falls to 0% for any reason. I guess we should fix the fact the "miss" shots can scatter further than the max range of the weapon though.