Why did only one of these soldiers take a reaction shot?

[sengruber]

Just started playing openxcom and I'm confused by this situation.  As pictured I have a line of soldiers guarding a UFO door, none of whom acted or moved last turn, but only 1 of them took a reaction shot when the sectoid walked out the door and fired, and the shooter wasn't even the soldier with the highest reaction stat.  What's going on?  I'm playing nightly 2014-8-30 21:39

[Dioxine]

Short answer: it's XCom, baby.

Long answer: the actual reaction fire chance is Reactions x remaining % TUs & has to be higher than alien's (unless he's ambushed, ie doesn't see your men before being reaction-fired at).

[sengruber]

I thought the sectoid should have been ambushed.  When he opens the door and comes out he's looking straight ahead and can't see my soldiers until he turns, at least I thought that was his field of view.   Maybe their isn't a concept of ambush and it's all dependent on the initiative stat calculation.

[Dioxine]

Well, if that was an X-Com soldier in the place of that Sectoid he'd certainly take the full broadside... Aliens seem to be a little cheaty here.

[ivandogovich]

If you want a complete understanding of reaction fire:

https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Reaction_Fire

but, bottom line.. the more things the enemy does, (moves, turns, shots, etc), the more chances there are.  Also remember that snap shots are what are used for reactions, so some weapons are not well suited for that.

Cheers, Ivan

[The Reaver of Darkness]

The reaction attribute of the alien helps mitigate your soldiers' ability to perform reaction fire, as well as their remaining time units. I suspect that sometimes the aliens will intentionally yield some time units at the end of the turn both to allow them to perform reaction fire and to prevent themselves from receiving it. Also, sectoids have a particularly high reaction attribute.

Reaction fire is messed up in the game, with high reaction attributes on aliens causing unrealistic scenarios. You can take advantage of this if you disarm an alien and surround it with pistol-equipped soldiers, to train up their reactions. Once the reaction stat on your soldiers is nice and high, you will find they will react at the slightest provocation. The training will probably also have a wonderful impact on their ability to hit as well.

[yrizoud]

All these answers don't answer the question : To the best of everyone's knowledge, there is not supposed to be any random factor in reaction calculation. If the slow soldier with full TUs could take a shot, every other soldier with better reactions and full TUs should have been able to shoot too.
So this situation is unexplained.

[kkmic]

Can you proved the savedgame?

[Sharp]

Wasn't this an issue before? Or maybe still is? It's not that it's just that one soldier who took the shot it's that none of the others did, I think that was/is because the game just checks one soldier at a time and once it's a success then that soldier fires and no more reaction calculation is taken even though others should also be able to react.

I don't recall ever having more then one alien fire at me in reaction to me doing one (reactionable) action even though it looks like multiple should be able to fire at me and in some cases do if I survive the first shot and then do another movement.

Of course I could be vastly wrong and misremembering.

[NoelBuddy]

I don't recall ever having more then one alien fire at me in reaction to me doing one (reactionable) action even though it looks like multiple should be able to fire at me and in some cases do if I survive the first shot and then do another movement.

My rookie who just dodged 6 shots reacting from his first step out onto the ramp bravely wasting xeno TUs so the rest of the squad might be able to survive deployment would beg to differ.  Any unit that can take a shot gets a reaction check at it until they all fail or the offending unit goes down.  Each time they shoot tho they burn some TU so there's a fair chance they won't pass the check for a second shot until you burn some more of your TUs and then trigger another reactionable event.

[The Reaver of Darkness]

Yes, I have had several aliens shoot from one of my movements, or several of my soldiers shoot from one alien movement. I haven't tested it in Open X-Com but I assume it is unchanged.

Ability to fire isn't based only on reaction stat, but on both reactions and remaining time units. If the soldier with lower reactions had a lot more available time units, that could have made the difference. Simply having enough time units to fire the shot does not give the soldier maximum chance to perform reaction shots.