Part 4: Operation Shattered Empire

Operation Shattered Empire


Last mission put Sprahl in the medbay for a while, and with Nittien becoming a second sniper and it being a bit to early to run two snipers in the squad I draft up two more hopeful rookies to fill the skyranger.



Rookie Ragnar Tiny Turtle - 37 Will 65 Aim


Rookie Finn Turne - 27 Will 70 Aim


Tiny is so close to the default soldier with out second wave options. Have to see how he does with Hidden Potential enabled. This gives us another strong four man team to deal with the next mission.



Polsy


Things discussed in the video:


Probability and perception

Guava brings up mention of the percent chances to hit not being exactly directly related to actual results. It's important to know that Easy and Normal will cheat a little behind the scenes in favor of the player. Every time the player misses on these difficulty levels they get a small invisible bonus to hit for their next shot, cumulative until they do score a hit. This isn't what we were talking about, but it's still important to know.

Guava provided the following link to one mans blog on the probability of X-Com. The blogger keeps track of over 1,200 shots taken, their displayed odds, and if they hit or not. He plots the data and overlays it with what you'd expect from perfect percentages. He further applies some statistical math to see if his data falls within acceptable parameters. I am not versed in statistics, but the evidence looks very strongly compelling that X-Com is truly random and that the opinion that the RNG being broken is perception biased.


I made a claim that dashing is faster than double moving

This is sort of correct, but after testing I wouldn't claim it anymore.

What happened in my testing is that I took a soldier, measured out how far they could travel if they dashed from the start, noted where the movement lines were, and then tried to get that far by doing a single move, and then moving again. It was a simple test but I think the mechanics of the game would say I am wrong. Soldiers don't pick up any extra movement from dashing versus a double move. However what I noticed every time was that the farthest boundaries of where I could move the second time were not always the same as before the soldier moved. What looked like was going on was that the pathing for the soldier, or making them stop on a specific square, makes the traveling soldier slightly less efficient at getting the most out of their movement range. Often I found I ended one square shorter than I could have if I had dashed. Or otherwise that squares on the very edge of the movement range were also ending one square shorter than before.

In conclusion I'd say I was wrong here. Soldiers definitely do not not pick up added movement range double moving versus dashing. However the double moving may cost you a tiny bit of range depending on pathing and terrain obstacles.