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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2831 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 7, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Video Game Thread

What are you playing?

Only a couple hours of Deus Ex this week:

Paul is alive and Jaime has joined us too. Maggie Chow was electro-shocked and chopped to bits with the Dragon's Tooth inside the Universal Constructor area. :) Soon after I ran into a bug back in NYC where the Illuminati contact, Stanton Dowd, wouldn't talk to me. Later discovered I had to shoot him in the head with a firearm. That actually worked. Next up, the Naval base.

Then I started a new Civ V game, intending to go wide. I finished the Liberty tree and ended up having only 3 cities by midgame. Whoops.

XCOM 2, Commander Ironman mode, of course.

My strongest memory: Missing 95% chances at point blank range is a bunch of bs.

I tend to think of those as if I make 40 shots in a battle, I'm likely to miss 2 of those in most battles.

I wonder how much frustration could be mitigated by listing the odds as 1/20 chance of failure rather than 95% success. I notice I subconsciously round anything 90% or higher to 100% and get mad when RNG fails me. The fraction reminds me that I will fail the "almost guaranteed hits" from time to time.

I don't know if XCom does this, but I've heard the Fire Emblem games will tilt the displayed vs. actual odds to be closer to how players mentally perceive chance... i.e. if the game says you have a 75% chance to hit, you're going to hit more than 3 out of every 4.

Older Fire Emblem games imply a roll of 1d100 in the user interface, but actually use 2d100 ÷ 2, resulting in a bell-shaped distribution. Newer ones use even more complicated rigmarole.

XCOM 2's RNG is biased toward the player (and does not match the user interface) on all difficulties except the hardest one.

But also it doesn’t make sense as presented.

I know what they’re trying to do: the D&D simulation where there’s a tiny chance (1/20) even on an easy shot that your foot will slip or they duck at the wrong moment or a grenade throws off your aim or something. And that works in an on-paper sim.

But when you can see in 3D and the whole thing is animated it’s just this guy getting a dreamy look on his face and aiming his gun three feet to the left for no reason.

The issue isn't that a 95% success chance will have you fail 5% of the attempts, I understand and accept that. The annoyance comes from how a shotgun aimed at point blank range directly at the enemy could somehow not hit. There's just no explanation for it.

I guess that just doesn't bother me because XCOM is essentially a 19th century tabletop game where the computer automates the measuring, note-taking, and manual referencing. Despite what the game is showing me on the screen, the "board" is not reality. It's a simplified mathematical abstraction of a more dynamic system. My guy isn't necessarily actually pointing his shotgun right at the enemy's face, so much as his minifig just happens to be positioned like that during this combat phase. The 95% misses are no more immersion breaking to me than the fact that everybody patiently waits their turn to move and attack.

Despite what the game is showing me on the screen, the "board" is not reality.

Then why is so much computing power wasted on showing a fancy but worthless simulation of reality on the screen? Compare the original X-Com (as well as Phoenix Point), where the probability of hitting actually is based on the 3D models.

I think the turn-based visuals really make it look goofy, as opposed to (say) the Ayys knocking your barrel aside right as you pull the trigger, or your character looking a bit more panicked at being right next to a berserker.

Yeah. "That's XCOM, baby!" Still bollocks though.

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