Yea, I don’t know why it went so wildly off the rails at the end there.
I remember commenting in BB4 that the squaddies felt stupidly OP, but I assumed that they were doing this just so they could test the endgame squad skills. I never for a moment imagined that they’d appear in the early to mid-game - and I fully expected them to get nerfed, because they were so obviously over the top.
This is a very good point regarding real or true ballistics vs dice (RNG) and a degree of abstraction.
A prior point is that there is, IMO, some confusion between real, or true ballistics vs realistic ballistics. PP has the former, insofar as each projectile is individually calculated rather than accuracy being simulated by a die roll. However, it is by no means realistic. I’m as much an expert in the field of firearms as in that of medicine 
, but it’s obvious that there just aren’t enough parameters in PP’s shooting mechanics to approach anything resembling a realistic portrayal of projectiles behavior. And that’s aside from the damage model…
Now, as to your point, I agree that die rolls and a sufficient degree of abstraction (e.g. the to hit chances are 75%, the damage range is x - x + y, and there is a 25% to score a critical hit) lend themselves much better to a realistic interpretation. That’s one of the big advantage of die rolls. The big disadvantage of die rolls is that, in fact, all you do is roll dice…
When I just started playing PP it struck me how much it reminded of something my friends and I used to play with when we were kids. We didn’t have any WH, or similar miniatures (we weren’t even aware of their existence), but we had plenty of small toy soldiers, and we used to play in improvised dioramas using a tiny spring-powered cannon to simulate shooting. There were some basic rules, of course: we played by turns and we had agreed on how to resolve certain dubious situations (eg if the plastic projectile hit a toy soldier, but it didn’t tip over it meant that it was a flesh wound and he couldn’t shoot on his next turn). Was using this little toy spring-powered cannon anything approaching simulating realistic ballistics? No way, but it was fun in a different way than rolling dice is.
And that’s how I think about PP’s ballistics/damage model. It’s obvious that it is not realistic and that it has no pretensions in that regard. I don’t know what changes it would take to make it realistic, and I can’t begin to imagine all the other changes that the game would require if it had a realistic ballistic and damage models. That’s why I think that changing one, or another aspect of them to make it more realistic only makes sense if it’s also right for the gameplay…
Like in the case of a Scylla, that is supposed to be the boss of horrors, or a battleship of you will, but is currently a helpless turkey, or a line cruiser.
There is one part you missed though, disabling a body part do remove HPs from the HP pool as well, we can set that HP loss to be higher than the damage actually needed to disable the part. That way you can still try to overkill the damaged part, but disabling multiple parts would do much more damage overall even without counting the bleed damage.
Between the two you spring-powered cannon is the more realistic in the sense that it’s an actual projectile which is being fired through the air.
PP still uses dice rolls to calculate the trajectory of its projectiles. I don’t know the actual system used, but it’ll be something along the lines of rolling multiple D6s and then subtracting the number of dice rolled from the total will give you a normal distribution of the projectile’s distance from centre:
and rolling one D360 to get the angle:
The difference between PP and other turn based games that use a percentage system to show the chance of hitting a target is not that PP doesn’t use dice rolls, it’s that the results of those dice rolls are shown to the player in a visual manner. And it’s that visual manner which jars.
But for the core system sitting behind those projectiles, PP hasn’t done away with dice rolls and replaced them with something different, the dice rolls are still there, it’s just that Snapshot have hidden them.
Spite, of course the game must be using some RNG function to calculate the trajectory, but the point is that it uses it calculate the trajectory, not the to hit chances. The game throws the dice, so to speak, to see at what angle the bullets will go, and where they go, they go. The function can be more or less sophisticated (making the ballistics more or less realistic), but whether the target gets hit, or not depends on the trajectory of the projectile.
And the game gives you the opportunity to maximise the trajectory of that projectile through the use of the targeting reticle, which throws up some interesting decision points at times - do I take a risk and try to blow its head/arm/GL off, or do I play it safe and target the body area where I am damn near guaranteed a hit?
Of course, the decision becomes less interesting and more forcedly deterministic when you know that if you don’t blow that arm off, it’s going to 1-shot you with 300HP Return Fire, but that’s all part of the balancing argument which the devs appear to be resolutely ignoring for now.
I think citadel missions should be kill all enemies instead of just kill the scylla, additionally the devs are planning to make citadels tougher anyway, so lets see what effect that has.
I think the scylla AI should be much more aggressive; it has close range attacks but I’ve never seen it get into melee. I also think Scyllas could be accompanied by a psychic royal guard (new pandoran) that applies buffs, heals and wards to protect the Scylla. The devs have talked about creating new pandorans for the game beyond the existing ones and a buffer/healer pandoran to protect scyllas would make a big difference in my opinion.
They also have long range abilities, one of which can daze the majority of one’s team.
Yeah, that’s the big issue with this game. We can complain about how OP our team get, but at some point the deck is so stacked against us we have no choice but to use all the cheap trick we can or lose the game. It’s sad that the way the game is we have to use multi-class soldiers and combine the OP skills and the best weapons we can find to ensure we kill more Pandas before they wreak us.
For example, the Pandas never run of ammo while we do (edit: I mean, we can, not that I normally run out of ammo)…
at what point is that? in my campaigns I see up to about 20 or so active enemy combatants, barring special missions that may have a few more.
now if you grab a weapon and use rage burst on everything you see you will run out of ammo, and some weapons like the crossbows have magazine sizes that will require more then the 1 spare magazine that I bring along . but I can’t say that I ever ran out…and I’m only really picking up 2 weapons per soldier, both with 1 extra mag.
I have to disagree, having just beat the game last night on hero using no skill spamming (one skill per turn per soldier, one rally max per turn), or frenzy, and no save scumming. And it wasn’t that hard either. Actually, I didn’t finish much of the research to get it over with quickly because towards the end it was just getting boring, not challenging. (I finished in mid March, by game time).
For my next run I will play on legendary and with more self imposed restrictions.
For the record, according to the EGS I have played the game now for 9 days, but that doesn’t take into account the many hours when the game was running but I wasn’t playing it.
This is not to say how great I am at this game, or that it is too easy, or even that the difficulty is fine as it is. It’s just that it is a complex game with many fairly intricate systems, and it takes time to master them (even though by this time I’m a pretty good player, I still got things to learn).
The real problem with difficulty in PP is that it is uneven and that players often face challenges for which they are not prepared. This has gotten much better since release, BTW, but it still has a long way to go. For the past couple of weeks I have been working on a guide and it struck me how many more things there are to learn in PP than in Firaxis XCom, and yet how much less of an effort PP makes at explaining itself.
I edited my previous post. Nah, i did not mean we always do run out of ammo, just that we can. On other hand enemy Pandas have unlimited ammo and can spam their attacks for as long as they want.
I have yet to finish the game once, so yeah I don’t know all there is to know yet. I’m not spamming skills that much, but I did notice some tactics works a lot better than others and some weapons like Sniper Rifles and grenades are next to mandatory to have. We also have the Heavies that are close to useless if used as is (ie without swapping their equipment and dual-classing them).
I use my heavies for long range artillery support. They do an excellent job of stripping armor.
not at all, but for the first playthrough it does look like that. Actually:
Sniper rifles have very bad damage per AP. Assault rifles, especially the Synedrion one, are a much better choice overall. For the last mission I had two of those, and only one top-tier SR.
Grenades are nice for softening crowds, but by no means necessary
Heavy is a great class even without dual classing. They can soak up a lot of damage with their armor and with top strength their bashing is one of the single best attacks in the game. Plus they have warcry which, IMO, is the most OP skill.
Btw, the Pandas do run out of ammo. Particularly they have very limited AoE ammo (e.g. explosive Chirons have 4 shots, just like a Scarab).
The thing is, as I said, there is a lot going on but there are no hints, no explanations. As an old school gamer I don’t mind - in fact I enjoy having to learn this on my own, but many players don’t. Which is why I’m all for making easy really easy and having different difficulty modes in each of which the players are given a different tool set. New players should be able to spam skills as much as they want, veteran players should have the choice to play with limited skill use.
A different, but connected issue, is that difficulty is uneven, largely because of balance issues.
-Sniper Rifles allow us to shoot from a safe distance the most troublesome enemies, and are one of the most effective weapon to take out body parts, armored or not.
-Grenades (explosive ones at least) are always effective, I have yet to see an enemy we can’t take out with them so they are always useful. Not true for all weapons in the game.
-Heavies are the worst early game, they are hard to level up as they deal the least damage compared to other classes (because they miss so much, attack slowly etc). Yes they do have a few useful perks as they level up but they are the most gimped class overall. They are far from the “king of the battlefield” unless using their big gun as a club count as being an effective combatant. Compared to their equivalent in FiraXcom, our heavies are pretty bad at their job.
-Might be true that some have limited ammo, but have you ever seen an Arthron or a Triton have to reload or stop shooting when they still have their weapons working?
I have not, but TBH I have never seen them live long enough to have a chance to run out of ammo. Having said that, you can see how much ammo they have left when you mind control them.
Regarding sniper rifles, grenades, heavies, these are all good arguments, and I was there too, I even started a thread on how to nerf SRs… And complained about ARs being useless and couldn’t for the life of me see any reason for having a pure heavy.
But not now . That’s my whole point - there is a lot more than meets the eye. For example, if you are thinking in terms of maximizing damage output at long range, sniper rifles make sense (though less than cannons with accuracy buffs, because they shred armor), but why focus on dealing with far away enemies when you can do way more damage at medium and CQC with ARs, shotguns, HMG, cannons, melee?
Also, if you limit yourself to only one use of each skill per soldier per turn, you can only use quickaim once, which means that normally SRs are restricted to one shot per turn…
Maybe it doesn’t change much, but except melee they have limit of attacks. 
Arthrons are too powerful so usually they must die before they will run out of ammo. Tritons with sniper rifles too. But I had few Tritons who had empty handguns after some time. Same with Chirons.
I’m aware of the pro and cons of most of the weapons in the game, i do use most of them (at least the ones I seen so far). What I mean for the SR is I feel forced to have at least one guy with an SR whenever I deploy a squad because there is no better weapon to deal with enemies I can’t safely get close to (or I need dead ASAP). All my soldiers carry grenades because again it’s a fairly effective weapon everyone can use even with a crippled arm. By no mean I’m saying i can’t fight without those, but when I do I have a much harder time finishing a mission without losses or badly injured soldiers.
The trajectory ‘is’ the hit chance. - Bullets when fired take a straight route between the point from where they are fired to whatever object they strike, there’s no wind, no effects of gravity, no recoil, no flaws in individual bullets, they don’t deviate from their path if they pass through a soft target; if the game simulates anything it’s a laser, not a projectile. It’s also not a moving target, idle animations aside every shot that is taken is at a stationary target.
Moreover the bullet isn’t only fired when the player takes a shot, the game is constantly rolling dice to simulate the ‘to hit’ chance of a shot at any given time, we know that this is how the player is able to see expected damage. At the point where the player chooses to take that shot, the simulated dice roll becomes the actual roll, the bullet traces its straight path and then actual damage is calculated for anything which that bullet it hits.
Rather than the player working with calculated percentages, and the player then judging whether that shot is worth taking, the player is instead asked a visual question, but it’s still has its basis in maths, only now it’s ‘what percentage of this circle is filled?’