[1.28 ground combat] Shots missing is ridiculous inside the UFO

[thixotrop]

I encountered Wraiths the first time, and read in the autopsy about their "shield" that maks them harder to hit.

OK, that explains some of the missed shots - even point blank (not really...).
But shotgun blasts point blank missing all bullets is realy strange. I mean, there is a fuzzy strange looking area in front of the soldier, he points the shotgun and pulls the trigger. How missing that?

But maybe just RNG sillyness, which happens sometimes?
Don't think so.
I had experimented with that and pulled all my soldiers inside the entry room. Opend the second door, threw a flash bang and then tried - multiple reloads - to get the Mentarch behind the two shielded Wraiths. In most trials they all miss the Mentarch from only 5-6 tiles away.

Unfortunately I lost my image of moving all soldiers inside and shooting at the Mentarch, so I had to sketch it, see below.
All missed. I tried three times. Does the Mentarch receives miss bonus when next/near to Wraiths?

Only funny thing was, when the Mentarch shoots as reaction or in the next round, it is always the soldier opening the door that dies, regardless where he goes to.
After 7-8 reloads I could kill all aliens with a lot of wounded soldiers.

 

However, I have experienced this lack of missing shots with nearly all fights inside UFO. And it is very, very frustrating.

[bifohe6676]

What were the hit-chances for your shots?

Can you give screenshots of the lower right info box that shows how those hit-chances were being calculated?

EDIT: or upload a save, I can take a look!

EDIT 2: also put some shields infront of your breachers, you want to direct the reaction fire to the shields instead of the fleshy shotgunners ideally nobody is out of cover at the end of your turn

Edited July 28, 2023 by bifohe6676

[thixotrop]

I'll try to find a save, but I don't know if I have the right one anymore.

My experience with shields in X2 is not great, one shot and it's gone, so I skipped those. In X1 it felt more durable.

And yes, normally I do have soldiers in cover at the end of a turn. Here, in the UFO, I experimented a lot to see why I can't get the aliens but always lose soldiers whenever I open the door.

[thixotrop]

This is the save with all soldiers in the entryroom and before opening the door:
auto_groundcombat_turn_17_start-215.json
Note: I normally don't get all soldiers inside, especially not the snipers. And the whole squad is not balanced as most of my experienced soldiers are wounded at base. However, the squad had decent hits in this mission before.

As said before, the one opening the door throws a flash bang. And these are the pictures of my shot chances then:
Shotgunner vs. Wraith

Shotgunner vs. Mentarch (...had to go back to make 2nd image)

Rifle vs. Mentarch

Sniper vs. Wraith

Sniper vs. Mentarch

The chances look not bad, but they miss a lot nevertheless which annoys me.
(Edit: My snipers never hit here, NEVER. And I have three...)
And - as said - it feels as if it is worse inside the UFO. In buildings it is much better, for instance in during the cleaner mission. Encountered aliens in buildings before and hit/miss is "normal". Inside the UFOs, not so much.
 

Edited July 29, 2023 by thixotrop

[bifohe6676]

11 hours ago, thixotrop said:

This is the save with all soldiers in the entryroom and before opening the door:
auto_groundcombat_turn_17_start-215.json
Note: I normally don't get all soldiers inside, especially not the snipers. And the whole squad is not balanced as most of my experienced soldiers are wounded at base. However, the squad had decent hits in this mission before.

As said before, the one opening the door throws a flash bang. And these are the pictures of my shot chances then:
Shotgunner vs. Wraith

Shotgunner vs. Mentarch (...had to go back to make 2nd image)

Rifle vs. Mentarch

Sniper vs. Wraith

Sniper vs. Mentarch

The chances look not bad, but they miss a lot nevertheless which annoys me.
(Edit: My snipers never hit here, NEVER. And I have three...)
And - as said - it feels as if it is worse inside the UFO. In buildings it is much better, for instance in during the cleaner mission. Encountered aliens in buildings before and hit/miss is "normal". Inside the UFOs, not so much.
 

I loaded up your save and looked at the screenshots, the hit-chances seem all fine to me considering the covers and the situation, but I noticed other things:

•  where are your demolition charges? they are a really important tool to massively increase hit-chances, but no worries, you got a MARS here left with 3 rockets, a single rocket could take care of the alien cover here, I realize you don't wan't to not drive it into the UFO and lose it, but you can easily fire the shot from outside after one of your guys opens the doors for it (future missions should have demo charges though)
• where are your pistols? pistols excel in close ranges and you get a couple of shots off in the same turn because of the small TU cost
• the Wraith cloaking field is working as intended here to ruin your hit-chances, you need to uncloak them to have "real" hit-chances against them, you got a couple spare frags and rockets for this task still though
• your entry-stack is clogged up, you can't run in, shoot and run out/into cover further down the UFO easily, so you are commiting your entire squad to 1 single turn opening yourself to the counterattack should any alien survive, also the guys who have to run in might not have enough TUs left and will block the guys who stand in the back from getting proper LOS for their shots and nades
• speaking of MARS, you can supress the aliens, drive the MARS into the UFO airlock-doors to permanently break them, drive the MARS back out into safety, and take pot-shots and throw nades all you want with your soldiers standing outside on the street, that way you can utilize your sniper advantage more if you want
• get rid of the tazers for now, their current accuracy is crap and will probably get balanced soon in a future patch, go for the baton for now if you want to capture aliens

I loaded the save and noticed you could just throw 1 flash and all your frags, or triple-rocket with the MARS and end this mission that way without any trouble, but maybe you don't want to lose their loot in the blasts, so I loaded your save and breached the UFO 5 times in different ways with this risky stack without any further preparation:

1. threw flash, uncloaked with frag, and then rushed in the entire squad and just started shooting, only 1 missed attack by your soliders out of 7 attacks taken (last solider and MARS didn't spend TU), mission won with no resistance
2. threw flash, moved a frag-carrier into the UFO and threw to uncloak, other soldier shoot (I think 2 miss), mission won with no resistance
3. threw flash, move the squad a bit to make way for MARS, have MARS steamroll their cover, squad has no trouble gunning the cover-less aliens, mission won with no resistance and no misses
4. variation of the above things, mission won with no resistance
5. variation of the above things, mission won with no resistance

So yeah maybe you just got really unlucky in your attack-outcomes on top of the tactical considerations? (after all even 50% hit-chance means you will miss half the time)

If you would spend a turn stacking the squad up properly before breaching, it would go even more smoothly I bet, best of luck!

P.S. Don't forget to sell that massive pile of loot in your base's storage, especially the Cleaner data and the corpses, you get a ton of money for them

 

[thixotrop]

Wow, thanks for being so detailed.

"..the hit-chances seem all fine to me considering the covers and the situation.."
Really all of them?

I mean Wraiths and furniture objetcs in the way, okay. But this:

65%, two steps away with nothing in between, and then missing a lot (over a couple of reloads) was what made me to experiment here with soldier stacking.

Your remarks:

• demolition charges - I don't use them at the moment. Just a choice of playstyle.
• pistols - had them for a time but they didn't do it for me. I had Snipers with pistols to go in the UFO, but it wasn't worth it.
• Wraiths - my first encounter in X2 here. Did read about the shield thing in the autopsy. I did not want to use grenades due to damge to loot.
• entry stack - like I said, I don't do that normally, it was a test because of the missing shots.
• MARS - ok I did not know that it can break the UFO doors too by driving through it.
• Tazers - I have build them recently and used them the first time in this mission. And yes I have seen that they don't work properly and have too small range. Batons are on their way.

Your suggestions:

• I have not yet tried to uncloak with frag grenades, due to this being my first encounter. Will glady use that.
• Yes I always position my soldiers properly before opening the doors.
  (Not like i did here in the entry room, though. But fate (RNG) was against me that whole day I guess, so I went to extremes.)
• I refrained form selling stock right now, as I don't know if future research projects reveal to us something of it, like Sebillian corpse for "insert future gadget here"

Again thanks for tackling this.
I will try to change my approach here and see what will wortk better.
Thus said, I am still not convinced that displayed hit chances and actually hit/miss is directly related. Their seems to be some other hidden factor here, but I am no one for meta-gaming.

Edited July 30, 2023 by thixotrop

[Skyfire]

7 hours ago, thixotrop said:

I mean Wraiths and furniture objetcs in the way, okay. But this:

65%, two steps away with nothing in between, and then missing a lot (over a couple of reloads) was what made me to experiment here with soldier stacking.

The big thing that jumps out at me there is the 48 aim on that soldier - that's middle-to-low for a brand-now rookie. Part of your problem is that that guy's just not a very good shot.

[bifohe6676]

22 hours ago, thixotrop said:

Wow, thanks for being so detailed.

"..the hit-chances seem all fine to me considering the covers and the situation.."
Really all of them?

I mean Wraiths and furniture objetcs in the way, okay. But this:

65%, two steps away with nothing in between, and then missing a lot (over a couple of reloads) was what made me to experiment here with soldier stacking.

Your remarks:

• demolition charges - I don't use them at the moment. Just a choice of playstyle.
• pistols - had them for a time but they didn't do it for me. I had Snipers with pistols to go in the UFO, but it wasn't worth it.
• Wraiths - my first encounter in X2 here. Did read about the shield thing in the autopsy. I did not want to use grenades due to damge to loot.
• entry stack - like I said, I don't do that normally, it was a test because of the missing shots.
• MARS - ok I did not know that it can break the UFO doors too by driving through it.
• Tazers - I have build them recently and used them the first time in this mission. And yes I have seen that they don't work properly and have too small range. Batons are on their way.

Your suggestions:

• I have not yet tried to uncloak with frag grenades, due to this being my first encounter. Will glady use that.
• Yes I always position my soldiers properly before opening the doors.
  (Not like i did here in the entry room, though. But fate (RNG) was against me that whole day I guess, so I went to extremes.)
• I refrained form selling stock right now, as I don't know if future research projects reveal to us something of it, like Sebillian corpse for "insert future gadget here"

Again thanks for tackling this.
I will try to change my approach here and see what will wortk better.
Thus said, I am still not convinced that displayed hit chances and actually hit/miss is directly related. Their seems to be some other hidden factor here, but I am no one for meta-gaming.

My pleasure!

The points you wrote sound good to me!

And yeah the hit-percentages might seem a bit off sometimes, but we have to remember that they are not really meant to be 1:1 "my soldier stands less than a meter away from this standing alien, why can't he hit it?", it is a turn-based game after all, the aliens are not standing around patiently waiting for the soldiers to run up to them and getting shot from point-blank

The "standing right next to alien and can't hit" really means "this soldier is shooting from this distance" without showing the layer of combat that gets lost in translation from a real-world real-time to turn-based combat scenario, in which things are not shown directly like the rookies' lost stamina after sprinting from cover to cover, adrenaline fucking up your fine-motor-control, the alien dodging where the barrel of the gun points at the last second, etc.

Also I agree what @Skyfire said, your squad is basically still fresh and will get MUCH more accurate once they get more experience later in the campaign (but don't worry I also have missed 98% shots with my Colonels who got 90-100 accuracy too, that is just part of the game )

As to if the % shown is really the dice-roll that is done behind the scenes, I can only assume that they are ment to be true in Xenonauts 2, all I know is that for the new XCOM games they were even deliberately cheating the rolls in favor of the player in a hidden mechanic, to reduce the amount of players complaining about bad rolls.

We humans are famous for being bad at judging probability because we pay way more attention to failure than to success.

For example for most people, when they lose/miss half the time in a couple of rounds in a game and if they are not told the exact 50% chance, it feels like really bad luck, even though it is correct.

So far I saw a couple of questionable situations in this game myself, but they were mostly about rough spots in some of these Early Access maps, not about bugged hit-chances, but always good to report anything that seems broken

 

EDIT: almost forgot:

Yeah AFAIK you can (in the current game version 1.28) safely sell all the corpses, Cleaner data sticks and even the alien weapons from your loot, that is one of those many areas where the game still needs some Dev work, it has been reported already by many people that this is not clear to new players.

I had to google the answer to that too when I first started, because like you I didn't want to miss out on any research/engineering later, but so far nothing seems to actually need items (except the alien materials) to be stocked, just encountered once.

Edited July 31, 2023 by bifohe6676