Am I just stupid, or is there no display of hit percentage of a non-aimed shot? I’m getting a hang of the aiming part, so I guess that if the target covers the entire red area it’s a (more or less) guaranteed hit.
there is no ‘aimed shot’, at lest not the way you are thinking, the ONLY difference between the normal shot and a zoomed in one is you can fine tune where the shot goes by zooming in. By default they aim for the center of mass, its targeting the same area as if you zoomed in and didn’t move the reticle at all, so even if you have not zoomed in, 50% of the shots will still hit within the red circle and 100% in the blue (its just you wont see those circles unless you zoom in)
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Thanks, that is very helpful. But still, no way of telling the hit percentage of a shot in the “default” location? I mean, without zooming in to estimate(!) how much of the 100% ring is filled by the target.
The issue with displaying hit percentages using our ballistics model, is that each individual bullet has its own hit chance.
In the early builds, we did experiment with percentages. The only way to get the hit percentage was to have the game run a Monte Carlo simulation when you took aim (basically the game would take the shot over and over again behind the scenes and average out the results). This meant the chance to hit was based on a simulation average, so it wasn’t accurate.
We then switched to the current system before we took our game to EGX Rezzed last April. Most people didn’t even notice (or weren’t bothered) by the lack of hit chance, so we decided to keep it that way.
People can get too hung up looking at numbers. The only numbers that really matter are 0 and 100 anyway - as you would never take a 0% chance to hit and you would always take a 100% chance to hit. Anything in-between is just going to be a gamble anyway.
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Great, thanks. So until I get a better feeling for hit percentages I basically need to zoom in to look at the circles 
There is one slight difference between a manually aimed and an auto aimed shot. When enemies are hit, they move. They can flinch and block, and as they die they fall. With the auto aimed shot, you will continue to track the centre of mass of the enemy you are shooting at, even if they move. With a manual shot, you fire at a fixed point in space. This can be very useful if you have 2 enemies, one behind the other. With the manual shot, you will keep shooting in the same direction even when the enemy at the front falls.
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Obvious follow-up question: do weapons, and if so which ones, have “punch-through”? Gotta get that MLG 360 noscope double crab people headshot!
Sniper Rifle definitely can get through some of the obstacles but objects mostly stop something like 5 damage, so only 2 points of damage get to the enemy. If that enemy has 2 points of armour you won’t do anything to him. More reliable is machine gun. First few bullets will destroy smaller cover and next bullets will do damage.
But it would be great if Synedrion would have some ultrasonic tungsten ammo (or some form of wave) which will omit most of the cover and hit organic enemy behind any obstacle. And we could get that technology.
Thanks! But I was more thinking about going through a target - like a crab dude - than an obstacle.
It works the same way with enemies. From what I know sniper rifle can hit two targets in a line. Or at least 2 parts of the same enemy (piercing through first and damaging the other). But you won’t find enemies standing like that waiting for your lucky sniper to hit both of them. Btw crabmen have head on the height of their chest/carapace. You won’t pierce those on one crab to hit another. 
I’d rather take a gamble on a 99% shot than a 1% shot. 
In fact I’d rather gamble on a 99% shot than a 98% shot… all the numbers matter.
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Well, it’s a different game with different mechanics. How many times have we heard (in both X-Com and CR) “That was a 95% chance - it should have hit!”
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Certainly it’s a different game mechanic in PP as compared to X-Com and CR, but if you’re talking about percentages, then what that percentage is does matter, there’s different degrees of gambling.
Whilst you do hear “That was a 95% chance - it should have hit!” from a certain sub set of players, it is a flawed statement - Somebody not understanding how maths works doesn’t make the maths stop working.
I can see that from a customer service point of view that not providing a mathematical figure that leads into a mistaken falsehood on the player’s part is perceived as a good way to avoid dissatisfaction. But I think you’ll still potentially hear 'That target circle was (almost) full - It should have hit!" from that sub set of players, and their ‘full’ won’t be when it’s a 100% certainty.
Meanwhile, those of us who do understand the maths don’t get to make a calculated decision. Or, let’s say at least you’re making it harder for us to do so. I’m going to be sitting looking at target circles and trying to visually estimate what percentage of it is filled with mutant alien scum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJN57ZO-MPw - Crabmen are kinda rectangular right??
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The problem of doing the kind of calculations you suggest is that you’re asking for the answer to a complex question - “what is the expectation value for shots in the overlap integral between the conical probability distribution of the gun’s accuracy and the cross-sectional area of the crabman I’m shooting at?” This would require ray tracing over many points in the cone of fire, and the computational cost would be noticable trying to pan around free aim, and would still give you only an approximate answer. In this case, it is much easier to understand visually “how much does the crabman fill this circle?” without giving another inexact number to complain about.
On an opinion note, I feel that XCOM2012 has somewhat ruined the expectation of realistic bullet physics by reducing it down to a dice roll instead, where the probability calculation is simple. This is great when you’re playing it like a board game, but fails when capturing more of the nuance of projectile motion. You’re going to have to deal with not being completely sure about the chances your shot unless you’re close enough to fit the entire crabman in your circle. I honestly prefer it this way, as it makes me tend to take more of those long shots and min-max percentages less.
Another side note: if you want to get a better feel for what these mechanics are like, play the original X-Com/UFO Defense. Although it tells you percentages for firing accuracies, they’re again an approximation for cone-of-fire and ray tracing, not roll a single die to see if you hit. This ends up leaving spraying low “percentage” automatic fire as a stronger tactic than the numbers would have you believe.
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The percentages in the original X-Com were also inherantly flawed. The percentage chance was the chance for you to hit the bullseye of the target (the centre of mass). The further away from that number you rolled, the wider the shot would be. So, as an example, if you had an 80% chance to hit, but rolled an 81% maybe all the way up to an 88% the shot would be wide of the bullseye but still hit the enemy. So, an 80% shot in reality is actually an 88% shot (depending how close you are and how big the target it).
I guess my point is, even the hit chances in original X-Com were BS - they were just BS in favour of the player.
Yes, that was what I was getting at - I’ve played with the re-creation of this code in openxcom and done some statistical modeling on it. The actual percentage is the chance of rolling a ‘low-deviation’ shot, but then the accuracy again factors into the amount of deviation within that bracket. The end result is that the most intuitive measure I could come up with is that it’s approximately chance to hit a soldier-sized target at 20 tiles, but 0% accuracy still hits ~2-5% of the time at that range. Closer range means better chance to hit for the same accuracy numbers, longer range means lower. Minimum deviation occurs at 110"%" accuracy. Now perhaps it’ll be clearer why giving the numbers aren’t a good choice here?
If that’s how it worked in the original X-Com then whether it’s flawed or not depends on whether how that mechanic worked was explained to the player. I don’t it recall it being explained this way, but it is a long long time ago, and my memory, certainly, is flawed.
If X-Com’s percentages ‘were’ based on bulls eye shots and that was explained to the player, than I’d personally find that acceptable and understand that the percentage given was a minimum chance to hit. It’s just a question of definition; ‘chance to hit’ can be replaced with ‘minimum chance to hit’. Either way taking an 80% (minimum chance) shot gives a better chance than taking a 20% (minimum chance) shot and I can easily determine that as a player.
As an aside if you’re going to give BS data to the player then better give that data in the player’s favour than against.
Whether you compute the hit percentage in PP using the filled area of a target circle of using a Monte Carlo simulation is secondary to the fact that you’re giving some data to that player that they can work with. Certainly I can gain an equivalent interpretation visually, but I don’t feel that that method gives as accurate information as what the game’s model might estimate for me mathematically. If I’m going to work with estimates I’d rather get a narrow estimate than a wide on. The argument for doing things this way seems to be that because you can’t provide the player with precise information on their chance to hit with a given shot then it’s better to give a rougher estimate have the player blame themselves if they get it wrong rather than give a closer estimate mathematically and risk that they blame the game.
The other downside to only showing visual information is that slows down my game-play if a player needs to continually zoom in and out of shots in order to estimate whether each shot is worth taking or not. Fine if I’m only taking the one shot, but I’m sometimes looking at multiple opponents with multiple soldiers and trying to decide which shot to take first whilst remembering how likely I’d estimated everyone else’s shots at those other opponents. Or alternatively, what I’m doing in practice is looking at the HP indicator to see how much ‘likely’ or ‘possible’ damage. I could be wrong, but I’m working on the basis that ‘likely’ means greater than 50% and ‘possible’ means between 1% and 50%. As to where these ‘likely’ and ‘possible’ indicators are coming from, again I could be wrong, but I’d guess that the game is still doing the Monte Carlo calculations in the background, just now it’s giving me less precise information via that HP indicator than it did previously with its percentages.
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SpiteAndMalice is pretty spot on as to what I’m feeling. And don’t get get me wrong, I never asked or pushed for an XCOM style way of calculating percentages.
Since a “to hit” percentage is apparently (for technical and political reasons) not going to work in this game, how about - as SpiteAndMalice was hinting at - a figure that represents something like % of target (center mass) in reticle? Because that is really what I would be trying to visually estimate by zooming in. Of course this figure becomes more or less irrelevant as soon as I zoom in to move where I am aiming, but it would still be very helpful.
And no, there are more percentages than 0% and 100% that matter.
I am so grateful for the lack of shot percentages, it’s true, that’s all you would rely on no matter if it made any sense or not.
In PP YOU; weigh up the shot using your own judgment. Skill, distance, obstacles and such. I find that far more satisfying, and I don’t rage quit if I miss, where as if it had a great big 90% stuck to it, I would.
Obviously a very political topic. It’s kind of difficult to have a constructive discussion if you assume that everyone will use only the percentage as something to solely rely on and then rage when a high percentage shot misses.
A percentage on center mass in reticle (or similar) would save me a lot of time in considering whether to zoom in for a precision shot or to relocate first. A quality of life setting. My suggestion is therefore to make the above an option to toggle on/off. That way, hopefully nobody needs to feel hurt - unless it hurts already knowing that the option is in the game.
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