20.8 Sniper Rifles accuracy / TU units spent

[Chilly]

Siper Rifles appear to always have the same accuracy, no matter if you use 40, 50 or 60 TU's for the shot. Always the same hit%. Cover and stuff works fine and reduces the hit%

[Mooton]

Moving before shooting can create a difference in accuracy of the shots. Really it just seems like the minimum accuracy was buffed far too much for an unchanged maximum.

[Miyuki]

Since sniper rifles can't benefit from close range bonus, instead they lose accuracy as you get that close, so their maximum is always 95% for a standing target and 75% for a crouched target. Unskilled soldiers shooting at the very edges of the weapon's effective range usually get barely 60-70% with 60 TUs without cover between the target. But the more skilled they get, what makes it harder is usually the cover that aliens are behind, which is a flat percentage reduction and that is where the higher minimum accuracy really comes in. Earlier I could be shooting forever at targets behind a cover with only 5-15% hit changes, but now it's much more reasonable at around 25% when the targets are behind half-body height covers. In my opinion, you should benefit significantly from outmaneuvering your enemies, or getting lucky and catching them in the open, especially because they later take multiple hits to take down.

However, the greatest benefit of the newly balanced accuracy system is that assault rifles are by far more useful than they used to be at medium ranges, where as shotguns get great benefits at short ranges, where I've seen percentages upwards of 170 right next to the target with maximum TUs, so just choose to use enough TUs to hit, but not too many to waste some. Though pretty much only non-combatants can be one-shot that way, so you still have to be smart with time units. I didn't used to really use assault rifles for anything until now, where their damage and accuracy was utter crap compared to snipers who raked in most kills and even then after long-winded series of misses. At times I didn't have enough batteries for the lasers and had to scrounge up alien weapons in some alien base missions.

Combat so far in my opinion has been quite good, as the difficulty ramps up nicely and few weapons can ever one-shot any alien at any time. The aliens have been quite smart with cover as well, so it's been mostly about exchanging shots from cover, while trying to keep soldiers from bunching up within a grenade's blast radius, which I find quite realistic.

Edited December 14, 2013 by Miyuki

[Chris]

Yeah, had a chat to Aaron and we didn't realise the accuracy multiplier was not set to 1. We're reducing it down now and hopefully it'll add some differentiation between different zoom levels again.