this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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X-COM (from the 90's, not the remake):
I totally sucked at playing X-COM and died a lot, until I learned about real world squad tactics.
In X-COM, the members of your team can get scared/lose it, and behave in random ways like throwing away their weapons/fleeing the fight or just going berserk and shooting around.
So, after I improved my game with my newly acquainted knowledge of real world squad tactics, I had a terror mission. Terror missions are missions, where the aliens attack and which are harder than the other missions.
I managed to survive the load out from the helicopter and kill nearly every alien on first contact, thanks to very careful and orchestrated movement of my squad.
There was one alien left, I tried to shoot it several times from a distance, and of course (this being X-COM after all), all of my shoots missed...
... THE ALIEN STRESSED OUT AND BERSERKED...
I didn't even know that it was possible. After weeks of loosing and frustration, this one moment is the most satisfying moment of my entire gaming history (more than 30 years now).
Haven't found any modern game, where this would be even possible!
Mandatory link to OpenXcom
I remember once playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I was assaulting a medium-sized UFO, and I'd reached the front door.
Hesitant to just run in through the front door, I sent half of my party round, so they could break the wall on the other side and flank the enemies inside.
It took a few turns to maneuver my forces round the side of the UFO, and as I did so, an alien squadron spotted my three guys on the door, and they started blasting. With my flanking team still well out of range, I had to sprint them forward to help - right into even more aliens.
My men got decimated. Six turned into four, then three, until only two men remained against well over a dozen dangerous aliens. And so remain they did. Thomas Bassoon and Eduardo Garcia were immortalized as legends that day, as they fought off multiple alien squads with just the two of them.
When XCOM 2 rolled around, with a notable time skip, these were the two soldiers I grandfathered in. Two veterans, here to fight the aliens once more.
Side note: In the tutorial for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, your squad of four is scripted to only have one survivor. Eduardo Garcia was that survivor.
Very nice! :-) Cheers to Eduardo!
OG X-COM was an exercise in frustration. Fuck Chrysalids and their ability to not only move large distances but also attack in the same turn, one-hit kill your troops, and turn their corpses into more Chrysalids.
Also their stats are monstrous compared to the Enemy Unknown variant.
Oh gods the hit probability was just such an irritating mechanism; you could practically have your gun's muzzle on an alien's forehead and still manage to miss several times with 80% chance to hit.
People say that's just the true odds but I really don't think that's the case. Even if I use the c++ old and flawed Rand function, rolling 2d10 almost always gives me at least one roll above 2. So in 2 shots at least one should hit. Even in the newest xcom I remember rolling 6 shots with 90% and missing all of them. 8 feel like XCOM has something broken or influencing it outside of percentage.
Yeah those odds-beating misses at least felt like they happened way too often, and I'm pretty sure the percentage really wasn't a "raw" probability but that there was some other fuckery also involved.
Sure, it's definitely statistically possible to miss a few 90% shots in a row, but eg. there's a 0.0001% chance of missing 6 in a row at 90% – and it's not like shit like that only happened once on a blue moon in XCOM
The internet is also littered with these types of studies: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/191291-xcom-2/79589841 where someone went through and calculated up some scores and hit well below the standard deviation for shots.
Where would be the fun w/o a missed shot from your shotgun when standing right next to the alien? ;-)