Shooting Accuracy

[adam]

The accuracy model of this game is ludicrous. I just watched rookies shoot 60 degrees off-target for a distance that couldn't have been even 100 yards.

I don't really blame the devs; this is the way the original worked. It was stupid then too, but less noticeable, given all the limitations of DOS games.

Defending ourselves from aliens we can't rustle up rookies who can aim something like on-target? In a world with many billions of people?

The placement of ships is similarly stupid.

[kevL]

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[Meridian]

Vanilla will stay vanilla.

However, OpenXcom offers you a ton of modding possibilities and you can easily change your soldier's accuracy and the placement of ships to suit your desires.

[Rubber Cannonball]

Defending ourselves from aliens we can't rustle up rookies who can aim something like on-target?

You want too much.  XCom has the best scientists in the world.  In a year's time they came up with an interplanetary vessel armed with fusion weapons.  Even if it is claimed that is just stolen tech from the aliens, they also came up with several laser weapons all on their own in about a month.  Ronald Reagan spent years and billions of dollars with thousands of scientists on his "star wars program" and didn't even get a viable laser pistol design.  XCom also has the best engineering and machine shop operation in the world.  These guys built those light weight, accurate, no spare battery packs required laser weapons.  But even more incredible, they built that fusion weapon armed interplanetary vessel in about a month all onsite mostly out of recycled junk.  In comparision, Boeing which is a much bigger organization with a much bigger budget and much more experience designing and building aircraft couldn't get their software right on their 737 Max nor get their Starliner to the ISS.

As for the soldiers, well see the best I can figure it, XCom doesn't use trained soldiers.  After all, if they started with special forces guys or the "best of the best of the best,"  these rookies wouldn't get over 3 times stronger over the course of a year.  Xcom also doesn't seem to have any basic training capability either, instead preferring to do "on the job training" during missions.  Unlike the mib guys, xcom never developed a neuralyzer.  I think XCom drafts or conscripts into service any civilian that reports any ufos or little grey men in order to keep the whole alien thing secret.  If a bunch of draftees get killed fighting aliens, well at least they can't spill the beans about flying saucers.  If XCom is successful and the old surviving veterans years later tell stories about fighting big green men, secret government agents can discredit them by reminding the public these guys also claimed orange snake people terrorized their neighborhood in the late 90's.  Similar to how in the movie "Independence Day" for years no one took the character Russel Casse, played by Randy Quaid, seriously about being abducted by aliens.

[Countdown]

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I don't think I've seen this before. That image is hilarious (and accurate ...well, accurate about being inaccurate lol).

[The Reaver of Darkness]

The nice thing about openxcom's accuracy model is that a shot with a higher listed accuracy value will not veer off target by such a large angle. This means that the closer your target is, the less accuracy you need to reliably hit it. This was not so in the original game, where the accuracy value only gave you the chance of getting a perfect hit, while all non-perfect hits had randomized stormtrooper accuracy and only reliably hit adjacent targets. Even 1 square distance was enough to cause most "misses" to actually miss.

edit: openxcom extended has the improved accuracy model

[Meridian]

This was not so in the original game, where the accuracy value only gave you the chance of getting a perfect hit, while all non-perfect hits had randomized stormtrooper accuracy and only reliably hit adjacent targets. Even 1 square distance was enough to cause most "misses" to actually miss.

As far as I know, this is not true.

Original worked the same as OpenXcom.

[Warboy1982]

the accuracy model in openxcom is 1:1 with the original, we went to painstaking efforts to ensure that.

[The Reaver of Darkness]

the accuracy model in openxcom is 1:1 with the original, we went to painstaking efforts to ensure that.

My preliminary testing in the GOG version of the game would seem to confirm that, however that is most assuredly NOT the experience I had back in the day playing the collector's edition. In openxcom, a shot with 75% accuracy will never veer 40 degrees off course but it routinely did in the old game. Any high accuracy shot taken several times would show mostly precision hits along exactly the same shot path (or precision misses, if it's a bad path), while all of the shots that aren't a perfect hit would just be randomly aimed in approximately the same direction as the target. It seemed as though having the target be closer caused the maximum shot angle to increase, and I've seen a point-blank shot veer off by as much as 90 degrees from its target in the old game, probably the collector's edition. It was so much of a problem that I ran several tests and confirmed that low-accuracy shots taken with one space distance from the target will miss more often than they hit. I even discovered that the angle to the target can drastically alter the chance to hit them. A target standing orthogonally adjacent to the shooter has something like a 90%+ chance to get hit with a missing shot, while a target diagonally adjacent and one space lower than the shooter will get hit by around 10% of misses or less.

Maybe it's OXCE, but a shooter listing over 50% accuracy will always have a narrow shot angle with degrees in the single digits. Firing at a target ten squares away, they will rarely miss by more than a square. And in my preliminary testing on the GOG version of X-Com (just now), that appears to also be the case. If that had always been the case, then where did all of these X-Com accuracy memes come from? My very significant amount of experience firing weapons in open xcom extended not only contrasts heavily with my very significant amount of experience firing weapons in the old games, I've also never at any point in time playing OXCE had any provocation to despise the OXCE accuracy system. (Though when I played OXC, I recall having a ton of problems with it.)

Actually I remember now. OXCE fixes accuracy. It was when I switched to OXCE that I stopped having accuracy problems. Previously, the accuracy problems were so bad that it was virtually impossible to mod my way around them. But with OXCE accuracy, it works so well I almost don't need to make any changes.

[Meridian]

Accuracy in OXC and OXCE is identical. 100% sure.

[robin]

There was this thing discussed hundreds years ago about a difference between vanilla and OXC targeting:

[...]
Vanilla got only 3x4 grid - just 12 target points, so in most of cases the target voxel was at least 1 voxel away from the obstacle, and AIM was hitting the target. In OpenXcom we have a grid 3x10, with really precise vertical, which OFTEN choses the voxel at the edge of obstacle, which instantly lessen chances by 50% for AIM.

Dunno if it was ever changed.

[Warboy1982]

There was this thing discussed hundreds years ago about a difference between vanilla and OXC targeting:
(quote from 2015)
Dunno if it was ever changed.

it was, repeatedly, volutar ensured that it was identical.

[robin]

Thanks for the clarification and the commitment.

[The Reaver of Darkness]

There is one difference oxc definitely has over the original--and it might just be a visual glitch. But shots regularly travel through the target and keep going, a miss even though it looks like a direct hit. It is difficult to demonstrate it on video, it just happens randomly every now and then. But in playing a mod which gives weapons much lower accuracy than I am used to, I noticed it happening far more often. I was making point-blank auto shots (1-4 squares between shooter and target) with listed accuracy below 20%, and seeing multiple shots in a row go center of the target and keep going, finally impacting on something behind the target. I NEVER saw that in the original.

[Warboy1982]

what you see on-screen and what the game uses behind the scenes are two very different things.
you see a 2D sprite-based representation/interpretation of a 3D voxel-based world.
if anything, it's a visual difference only.

take my word for it, the trajectory calculation is as identical to the original as possible.