Why do turn-based games use percentage based to-hit and how do we fix it?

I just beat xcom wotc on ironman, what next? I've still got this itch for turn based tactics like xcom.

>Why do turn-based games use percentage based to-hit
Picture related.
>and how do we fix it?
You can make games where it is not an element, but generally speaking it does not need to be fixed.

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Phoenix point tried something else and it was broken.

Manage risk when your options are 1. shoot 2. do nothing

My biggest issue is that % can give wrong feedback, that strategically you can make the best move, but it's punished by poor RNG.
If you have 99% to hit 4 attacks and you only needed to hit with 1, but if you miss all of them and the enemy attacks and lands their 20% to hit attack you die and lose 20 hours of progress you failed not because of bad decisionmaking, but because of RNG.

>Phoenix point tried something else and it was broken.
It was broken because of poor design and also for some stupid reason allowed shots to miss because of units idle animations.

It's a relic of the past

Based
Zoomers don't realize how much this inspired and need to play it

And thats perfectly fine. Things like that make gameplay be more emergent and needing to prepare for the worst to happen. If you were constantly guaranteed and rewarded for good decisionmaking and didnt have a small chance of failing, how boring it would be.

People that liked games like Advance Wars and Into the Breach don't think so.

>playing turd-based games in anno fucking domini 2020

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OP pic made me laugh like small girl

Good thing they can play Advance Wars and Into the Breach then

>n-nnooooooo things are not going perfectly as planned and now i have to deal with an unexpected and emergent situation

>everyone complains when their 80% chance shot doesnt hit
>no one complains when their 20% crapshot does

mmmmm

if those are your only options you fucked up before

by making it a physics engine and not a well dressed spreadsheet of probabilities
games like silent storm are perfect examples of what they could achieve, especially with modern technology
xcom 2 is an example of what people actually buy though

This has to be the dumbest take I've read today

imagine a turn based game where everything has a 100% chance to hit, meaning the only build allowed is whichever allows you to make a turn faster than the opponent

What about this:
>There is a "miss pool"
>Whenever you take a shot, you add the chance to miss to your "miss pool"
>If your "miss pool" would be over 100%, your shot misses, then subtract 100% from your miss pool.
>Start each battle with 0-50% miss in your miss pool.

So, if you had five 80% shots, you would expect one of them to miss, but not two.

If every attack was guaranteed to hit you end up with Into the Breach which is just a glorified chess puzzle

interesting take
How much 'miss' would each shot add to the pool?

you dont fix it, its fine.

Mechanicus doesn't have percentages, just line of sight
you aim at it , you hit it

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I think my main problem is just how shooting works in xcom. It doesn't feel realistic at all, which isn't necessarily a bad thing realism isn't always good for video games, but I think in this case it matters. In real life if a target is behind solid cover they're just not going to get hit unless they're actually exposed. In xcom you can get hit behind cover even if it doesn't really make sense because cover doesn't actually act as cover, it just affects the hit percentage. Spotting is also kind of bad. So is how enemies are aggroed.

I understand that the primary reason for all the decisions that went into this were for balance purposes. It's a video game after all. But there are times when I can't help but think the system as is holds the game back. The modern xcom system is based on the combat system used by a game that is literally 25 years old now. The first xcom is still a good game, but for these modern ones I wish they had done something more revolutionary for the combat system. Something that actually reflected all the changes in technology since 1995 and the greater overall experience people now have with making games. That said, I don't hate modern xcom at all, I just see some flaws with it. The only thing I really hate about modern xcom is the stupid avatar project ticker going up so quickly in 2. I felt like I had less time to enjoy the nightmare world of aliens ruling the earth because it went up so rapidly.

I like this game but it's way too easy, it needs some mods

We dont do anything with it because its perfect.

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This is called psudorandom distribution and a lot of games probably already use it
Some games even manipulate RNG based on the situation to make the game better, more exciting, false randomness

Outdated carryover from the old days when computers did not have the capacity to simulate everything needed, so they simplified it to a single random number, which in turn is inherited from pen and paper games (in which you are even more limited, computationally).

It's a trash system that has no business being used but faggots with low standards allow it to happen.

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I dont mind it because its basically the only way you can mimic actual combat. Have in mind the game is trying to recreate a real time situation in a turn based system, so realistically the things getting hit behind cover would be moving out of cover in order to shoot or not cover perfectly or having just got to cover or moving out of that cover.

>not being a fan of 17%

youtube.com/watch?v=WI4n8RymM0A

>faggots with low standards
To be noted this is everyone playing fucking NuCom, I have more respect for Fortnite players.

*dab*

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I like literal dice rolls instead of percentage to hit numbers. Basically the same thing, sure, but hitting 6s in a to hit system feels better

>new XCOM
Pretty stupid games, EW was more fun than 2
>don't cheese the game
>get overpowered material
>get cool MECs
2 just has a lot of enemies that break the rules and the DLC lets you break the rules too
>enemy splits when shot and always flanks your squad per turn
>robot enemy with massive health, armor and three actions per turn
>enemy revives upon death and goes berserk
The game is about rushing better guns so you kill enemies before they kill you, the games are stupid but they're pretty fine for a while, RNG isn't that much of a problem when you can tard-rush the enemy with overpowered equipment or when you start getting those psi troopers rolling and you can turn a really strong enemy against its team. I'm not going to tell people to hate it though I preferred Mechanicus more
Based

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i like xenonauts because if you miss a shot it can travel onwards and hit something else, hopefully an alien
it lost a bit of charm by not being exactly like the classic xcom games though but its still fun
i really wish / hope xenonauts 2 is going to be like a modern rendition of silent storm, since i think they're making it 3D

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I do understand that's it's a turn based take on reality and that it has natural limitations, but I still found many aspects of combat frustrating. Even if you don't really mind bullets passing straight through solid concrete to hit your soldiers or the enemy, there's still the issues with seeing around corners when your soldiers don't have line of sight on it and the weird idea that aliens just wander around aimlessly until your soldiers get too close. I dunno, it all feels overbalanced and heavily calculated. I always felt like what I could do was being limited by a developer decision, not as a natural consequence of the battlefield.

>My biggest issue is that % can give wrong feedback, that strategically you can make the best move, but it's punished by poor RNG.
that's how things work
you can make the best decision in real life combat and still get fucked by something out of control as well
you then need to adapt to that situation.

When you consider the odds, you should not only consider the chance something goes wrong, but what happens if it goes wrong, and how you would play around that.

In his example, I assume however much the RNG is
so 80% chance would add 20 to the miss pool

>hit 4 guaranteed shots
>shoot a trashbin or an ally to intentionally miss
>hit 4 more guaranteed shots
wow you should be a game designer!

based xenonauts chad

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Nu-Xcom ruined the genre.
Also Darkest Dungeon is mobile game trash from a gameplay perspective

>that's how things work
But shooting isn't affected by a random number generator, It's affected by the skill of the shooter and the situation they're in. Devs used the RNG because it's far easier to do that then implement a ton of complicated mechanics that would take really long to get right.

>ids subbosed 2 be bad

Absolute grug-brain response by a retard

uncertainty and risk management can be done smoother and in far better ways than just straight RNG

Hit percentages are fine, as long as the ai doesn't cheat like in Xcom 2 and check rolls.
>Have one tanky dude out in the open with no cover to bait enemy fire
>ayyyy decides to shoot sniper who is in full cover, has height advantage and is a considerable distance away
>crits and one-shots him

If you play the game for a while you'll notice how rarely ai misses, they will literally only miss when all possible rolls are a fail.

There is 0 aim boost for the ai in the game. Up to Veteran it cheats in your favour

RNG is a cheap cop-out

Shooting trash shots dillutes your miss pool with more miss.

For example, let's say your miss pool starts at 0, and you have a set of shots.

85, 85, 65, 75, 25, 85, 75.

Your miss pool would go 15, 30, 65, 90, (miss) 65, 80, (miss) 5.

Whereas, if you take out the 25:

85, 85, 65, 75, 85, 75
15, 30, 65, 90, (miss) 5, 25

Taking that 25% shot essentially gives you an extra miss.

Calling this user out as based

Create more dynamic missions with more terrain changes possible, make more unique enemy types and change how enemies play and how they enter the battlefield so you have more to keep track of, create a better map and scenario generator that allows for more unique scenarios, add more mission objectives and different kinds of missions so you don't just flowchart it. But all of these things take more dev time of course so we'll just defend them for slapping punishing rng on everything and calling it a day.

Phoenix Point still uses dice rolls to decide where the bullets go, but you get to actually aim the weapons yourself, so it's more akin to the cone of fire in a shooter than just clicking on an enemy and the game deciding if you hit it or not. You can set up shots so that if they miss they might hit another enemy or at least destroy cover, for instance.

>Phoenix Point
remember when people thought this would be good.
Lmao

The odds of missing 4 80% shots in a row is 0.16%. That's a 1 in 625 chance.

I like it.

BattleTech is pretty fun.

Are you stupid? that's how it works
It looks at the distance, the angle, the objects between the shooter and the enemy, the size of the enemy, how good the shooter is, how good the gun is, how good the ammo is, whether the shooter has something to stabilize the weapon, whether the shooter has experience with the alien's anatomy etc.

Then instead of giving you all those variables, it tells you "after calculating all this shit, you have a 64% chance to hit"

He's saying the AI will essentially save scum. If you have 5 guys an enemy will shoot, the AI will check each one to see which one will hit, even if it isn't the one with the highest chance to hit.

>Taking that 25% shot essentially gives you an extra miss.
that's why you take a 90% or 80% shot, not a 25% shot

>Then instead of giving you all those variables, it tells you
You just fucked your own argument. I'm supposed to be the stupid one? Thanks for agreeing with me, I guess?

>I'm such a hardcore gamer, I want you to give me a spreadsheet of variables and make me calculate the odds yourself
wow look at you big man, sure you beat me, I'm stupid for understanding why they're making the game in a way that appeals to more players by removing unnecessary hassle

Every turn based game worth playing won't have you killed from a single bad RNG turn. If you die in those situation it's because you made bad moves earlier. XCOM is the perfect example. People always bitch at the "miss 99% shot and die" shit but then when they give more details it's always "well I missed a bunch of 30% shots and all my guys were wounded and flanked and I had no items to use anymore, the game is rigged I tell you".

Meaning it would be a sensible option to attack. But if you miss and die from it then that is the game telling you it was a bad move.

by opening up your brain and not thinking:
"50% is basically 100%"

you can lose a round or whatever off a single bad roll if the outcome of a bad roll is very bad
for example if you move all of your units close to a unit that explodes or throws grenades or something similar, fail the shot to kill him and then he fucks over your squad, maybe not killing them immediately, but bringing them low enough to the point where they wouldn't be able to finish the mission

That's a cute attempt at moving the goalpost. Next time think about what you want to say some more before you submit.

No, it means you have shit chance and got unlucky. Or maybe you couldve used the grenade that the game gives plenty of to ensure damage

There are so many 100% damage sources in XCOM EU and XCOM2.
There really is no need to complain about hit chance.