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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1355 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 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.

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.

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