Accuracy

[GloriouSin♪]

So like as far as i so far noticed skill 10/20 means you do something on an "average" level, as in as long as your pc's are not suffering from.. no additional complications, that pc works at 100% regular efficiancy relative to the skill used.

My question is, any one know how accuracy works and is it related to shooting skill at all? Cos it seems to always be about -20~40% of what it says. I checked a legendary 100% accuracy sniper with 100% aim at long range, shot from long range in clear weather, with a 100% mood pawn (and many many MANY MANY MANY other possible complications taken into account), that also has 12/20 in ranged. Thus arguibily i should have more than 100% chance to hit since there exist only possitive elements (perfect mood, perfect weather, perfect range, above 10/20 in shooting etc.; character has a bionic eye so has vision at 125% not 100% etc.)

Ad yet i hit about 60% of the time under these conditions (used debug to just stand there and shoot barbarians in the open while standing in the open myself; became so fun that i actually tested over 6000 shots with different weapons, made a real bloodbath over there, had to debug reset shooting to 12 like 50 times ;p and yes i always shot from the most optimal range etc.). It seems like the game strongly averages the accuracy toward the 40-60% range cos after testing both vanila and mod weapons i found that basically in these condition mentioned, MOST weapon have exactly the same ~60% chance to hit. While shooting skill seems to only affect how severe are your shots (as in shooting affects everything except chance to hit and damage DIRECTLY; it does affect those indirectly (high shoot seems to reduce weather penalties, stopping power and SEVERITY, not flate damage, of the wounds etc)).

Don't get me wrong it creates a very interesting and in many ways very intuitive balance... except the part where there seems to be just a relatively flat 40-60% hit chance which causes the game to be balanced in a very... CS way ;p as in noobs use snipers, pro's use machine guns. Cos at higher levels of shooting you want only more bullets, that becomes the most important, while at very low levels you only care about the damage you can inflict preferably in the least ammount of shots.

Sniper rifles seem to be the biggest offenders, at 100% aim (moded legendary sniper) and a normal legendary sniper at like ~92% aim; the 100% sniper hit 167/500 shots while the ~92% aim sniper hit 221/500 shots.

Am i missing something? (pun intended) Cos my only wild untested theory right now is that higher damage and/or stopping power, directly reduce accuracy.
Cos like a frikkin legendary ... smg? that had 5 shots in 1 burst that had near no stoping power and less then medium damage hit 412/500 shots with a ~70% accuracy...

[Xeno42]

check the shooting accuracy stat on the pawns info tab. it gives a breakdown of how shooting accurac is calculated

[Crim]

Accuracy is something like
92% + 0.5% per level, with slower growth after 10
12 is 97.5%
Skill level ^ Distance
Let's say 30 tiles?

0.975^30

0.467
or
46.7% base accuracy due to Skill

[Kittenpox]

Shooting Accuracy is based upon a number of factors including the weapon (specifically its range), the pawn skill, and others.
https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Shooting_Accuracy

The final accuracy of a shot is also affected by the range - as the accuracy is PER TILE not per shot.
Legendary sniper rifles are 100% even at short range, and so are good for testing with, but even a Masterwork sniper rifle has 95% accuracy for short-range targets.

a 0-Shooting skill pawn (89%) with a legendary sniper rifle, shooting a target 5 tiles away, has (0.89^5)= 55% chance for the shot to hit.
a 14-Shooting skill pawn (98%) with the same legendary weapon, shooting a target 32 tiles away, has (0.98^32)= 52% chance for the shot to hit.

Your pawn at skill 12, even with a perfect weapon, has 97.5% - or, a 2.5% chance to miss for every tile between it and the opponent. Which doesn't sound like much, but it adds up multiplies quickly.

Theres a couple of graphs on https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Sniper_rifle which help illustrate things as well.

[Not a Kobold spy]

If I remember correctly, Accuarcy is calculated like this:

( [Shooting stat accuarcy]^[Distance] )*[Weapon accuarcy]*[Body size]*[Cover]

Even if you shoot an uncovered human (size modifier 1) with sniper rifle and 20/20 shooting, that's "only" 63% chance to hit at max range.

It's impossible to raise accuarcy per tile above 99,9%, so even after stacking every possible bonus, you don't have 100% hit chance (though you probably wouldn't really feel the misses)

[Crim]

Image from the Wikia https://rimworldwiki.com/images/8/85/SniperRifleAccuracyNoTrait.png

[Astasia]

Base skill and gun are just a small but important part of the equation. The game provides many ways to improve accuracy so no individual method is going to get you to perfect accuracy, the ceiling is very high. Archotech Eyes, Go-Juice, Luciferium, Careful Shooter, Gunlink, Focus Psycast, Shooting Frenzy inspiration, Shooting Specialist ideo role, Combat Command aura, stack all of those on top of a 20/20 shooter with a legendary sniper and they will have like a 96% chance to hit from 45 tiles away. All of those things are useful, so if you strip most of them away and just give a skill 12 colonist a good gun, ya they aren't going to do amazingly well with it.

Mood has no effect on accuracy though.

[Gedsaro]

Also a pawns chance to hit another creature when you have then selected (may have to be drafted/in combat, not sure), you hover the mouse over the target pawn and it should show you chance to hit(and the reasons) something like, skill%, weapon%, distance, cover, weather and the like.

So yes, sometimes it sees like your 20/20 skill is hitting as often as a 0/20. thats probably not actually the case, but if it feels like it, it could be that you are using a bad weapon, and a bad range for the weapon in foggy rain while the enemy is in the best cover possible, in such a case all the multipliers probably reduce your chance to hit down to something like 5%, and once you are that low, you really don't see much diff between the high skill shooter hitting 5% of shots, vs the newbie hitting 2%

[GloriouSin♪]

From what i read here and on the wiki this is basically pure insanity which seems to boil down to: either go insane calculating the barely visiable differences in weapon stats.
Or just pick the best quality weapons you have for the appopriate stats and try to diversify and never have more than one guy with a sniper cos snipers are mostly pointless in this game. Since if you can't get the accuracy up to FLAT MINIMUM of AT LEAST 82,5% then the not really that substantial damage offered by snipers is pointless. Legendary Heavy SMG can dawn 2 enemies by shooting them 15 times in the same time a sniper shoots twice, MAYBE hitting with one shot, which will never instakill (unless shooting a naked hatchet wielding barbarian but... about as practical/impressive as a lv100 dude beating a lv 5 dude in an mmo), and the guys friend will maul you. I can definitely see having one single sniper per every four real weapons as reasonable-ish cos diversification and friends help to mitigate the giant sniper drawbacks, but i still find it MUCH more usefull to just have one more guy with a heavy smg instead of wasting a trained gunner on something as fickle and weak as a sniper rifle (DPS wise sniper rifle's are worse than almost every single weapon in the game; they have only one use, burst damage, which they are... poor at).
There should be some ACTION HERO button where you just shoot the sniper/crossbow, drop them on the floor and pick up a real weapon for the remainder of the fight ;p

[Kittenpox]

Honestly, yes you should diversify your weapons - rather than exclusively giving everybody sniper rifles and hoping for the best.
(Heavy SMGs are pretty great, but that's not the point.) Picking higher-quality weapons is a good choice. Giving weapons with quick refire rates (such as the Autopistol) to low-skilled pawns is also a good way to have them level up towards 10 more quickly.

In the Sniper vs SMG scenario, though, the sniper gets to have the first hit as it has double the range of the SMG. If the shot hits the leg or otherwise slows down the SMG user before they get into range, they get more free shots at the raider. If the sniper is sitting behind a Stockpile set to hold stone Chunks then they have the 50% cover bonus - and are less likely to be hit than the SMG user who is out in the open, or behind a tree that gives 25% cover bonus.
Not to mention there's nothing stopping you from having Shelves behind your soldiers to store other ranged/melee weapons so they can switch if foes get close.

As for the 'action hero' thing you mentioned, you *could* use something like https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=927155256 to have pawns auto-swap between 2-3 carried weapons, but I generally advise against modding Rimworld until the player is more thoroughly familiar with the game.
(If it counts for anything, I have used this mod in the past but don't nowadays.)

I'm not saying that sniper rifles are the absolute best weapon in the game - they're definitely not. But being able to initiate the fight in your own terms when attacking, or get the first hit on a foe (from cover) when defending, is still a very useful thing to have. :-)

--

Edit: Some folks get caught up in the idea that "Sniper rifles don't insta-kill with 100% accuracy, therefore they suck" - but I think that's missing the point entirely. Since that pawn usually won't be the only person firing, even taking chunks out of a target will make it easier for your other shooters to finish them off.
Even if the target is only slowed, then it turns a 6v6 (for example) into a 5v6 until the injured raider moves forward. Your own people are more likely to aim at the same target, and the foe has one less person aiming at your pawns.
In any case, I don't have a lot to add to the original question about how accuracy works, so I'll leave you folks to it. Best of luck, OP - and welcome to Rimworld. ^_^

[Astasia]

Originally posted by GloriouSin♪:

Or just pick the best quality weapons you have for the appopriate stats and try to diversify and never have more than one guy with a sniper cos snipers are mostly pointless in this game.

Pretty much, but snipers aren't at all pointless, they are just very situational like many weapons. In standard base defense they are pretty bad, not because of their accuracy or damage, but because of their fire rate. In fact they are one of the lowest DPS weapons in the game, the only weapons with lower optimal DPS than a sniper rifle are the shortbow and pila. What you can do very well with a sniper though is kite and pick off mostly stationary targets. They are extremely effective at dealing with sieges, sappers and some mech clusters, often allowing a single colonist with bionic legs to defang one of those threats solo. You usually want a legendary sniper rifle or two in every colony, but they probably wont be equipped most of the time.

Originally posted by GloriouSin♪:

MAYBE hitting with one shot, which will never instakill

Legendary snipers will instakill/down with most shots. The sniper has very high armor penetration so almost every enemy is "naked" against a sniper rifle as far as damage checks go. One hit from a high quality sniper will destroy almost any bodypart, and losing an arm or leg will usually down an enemy from pain, and most enemies that are downed will die. A torso shot will also generally cause enough pain to down even if the torso can survive a hit that large.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Astasia:

losing an arm or leg will usually down an enemy from pain
[...]
A torso shot will also generally cause enough pain to down even if the torso can survive a hit that large.

What? No.

38 damage to the torso with a gunshot inflicts 46% pain, which only downs a Wimp or someone with SEVERE health issues. If it hits a lung, kidney, or the stomach, the organ will be destroyed with no pain and insufficient vital statistics loss to cause a down. Hitting the sternum will cause an additional 28%, for 74% total, which is insufficient without assistance. Hitting the ribcage will cause 39%, for 85% total, which won't down someone with a war mask without help. Obviously a heart or liver shot will just kill them. A pelvis or spine hit will incapacitate them from loss of movement.

As for limbs, losing a limb will never cause a down on an otherwise-healthy non-wimp pawn. An untended lost limb is 38% pain (at least, that's what I could get using dev mode to destroy arm and shoulder. I couldn't get it to destroy the leg, but leading up to that it got the same pain values as the arm/shoulder so I assume it's the same, plus many times I've seen someone lose a leg and keep going)

So, hitting them in the head (except eye or jaw, because REASONS. I don't remember if ears are treated like those two and a bullet to it will never hit the rest of the head), neck, heart, or liver will kill them, pelvis or spine will down them, ribcage will down most, sternum will down most who have pain from other sources. Every other hit won't down anyone unless they're a Wimp or have severe health issues.

[Astasia]

It's been a while since I tested sniper rifle damage, I'm guessing my last one was when enemies couldn't stand on one leg, I remember shooting off a leg would down a pawn and I was pretty sure that was still a thing without extra pain tolerance but I guess not.

I know legendary snipers still one-shot enemies much of the time, I see this all the time in normal gameplay, but I haven't paid that much attention to why. Testing in game now I see it's because most shots hit the torso and the piercing damage usually forces an internal parts hit, hitting sternum, ribcage, spine or I think pelvis will down a pawn with no other injuries required from pain. I didn't get any pelvis hits in my test so I'm not sure about that, but sternum, ribcage and spine definitely down an enemy in one hit. Hitting heart or liver will obviously kill them, same with the neck or head. This is about 40% of hits from the sniper rifle I believe.

Legs and arms fall into the part protection range, legendary snipers don't do enough piercing damage to always destroy them in one hit, they are left at 1 hp, I assumed previously that was why limb shots didn't always down a pawn. In any case a single hit from a sniper will cripple an enemy and make them mostly useless for the rest of the fight even if they aren't downed.

[GloriouSin♪]

Originally posted by Astasia:

It's been a while since I tested sniper rifle damage, I'm guessing my last one was when enemies couldn't stand on one leg, I remember shooting off a leg would down a pawn and I was pretty sure that was still a thing without extra pain tolerance but I guess not.

I know legendary snipers still one-shot enemies much of the time, I see this all the time in normal gameplay, but I haven't paid that much attention to why. Testing in game now I see it's because most shots hit the torso and the piercing damage usually forces an internal parts hit, hitting sternum, ribcage, spine or I think pelvis will down a pawn with no other injuries required from pain. I didn't get any pelvis hits in my test so I'm not sure about that, but sternum, ribcage and spine definitely down an enemy in one hit. Hitting heart or liver will obviously kill them, same with the neck or head. This is about 40% of hits from the sniper rifle I believe.

Legs and arms fall into the part protection range, legendary snipers don't do enough piercing damage to always destroy them in one hit, they are left at 1 hp, I assumed previously that was why limb shots didn't always down a pawn. In any case a single hit from a sniper will cripple an enemy and make them mostly useless for the rest of the fight even if they aren't downed.

Nah trust me after another day of tests i can tell that sniper is straight up pointless. If you have the AWP sniper from Mods or similair then it ALMOST makes sense to have 1-2 snipers in a group of 6/12 people (and who the hell plays more than 6? ew). Unmodded legendary sniper rifles can't down anything but a wimp/critter level of threat in one shot. And the damage may be... decent...ish... but it won't offset the INSANE time it takes to shoot again and how open a sniper is at all times (solo or with friends) and if you measure DPS, sniper rifles are straight up a joke. Also the fact that most fights are either in "ambush" (no time for sniper and hard to position cos has to wait 2h to move between shots) or more often shooting each other from behind cover well...
Enemies behind cover are best dispatched with MASS firepower, a sniper will NEVER hit in these circumstance thus becoming as useful as a guy with a long stick.
I mean everything is ALWAYS a better choice than sniper rifle, which is kind of... sux?
I even made "gladiatorial fights" as tests ;p as in:
4 random weapon npc + sniper -VS- 4 random weapon npc + heavy smg; all naked.
The sniper team lost almost every fight, that's statistically so weird... but not that weird if you consider that most weapons are equal-ish and snipers just worse.
When i made them all full armored, the sniper team stopped winning fights ever at all.

Not really that import it's just one stupid weapon i mean revolvers are also 100% unusable those are enemy weapons, but thats a well known trope and you know it off the bat no explenation required; it's just weirdly counter-intuitive and the game helper should tell you that in their opinion sniper is a CSGO noob weapon and they hate it thus they made it useless ;p
Also there is shotguns having super short range but thats another classic trope, also made by someone who hates shotguns i assume ;p cos i used shotguns in real life plenty and they don't have bad range, your average assault shotgun has a better range and firepower than your average sidearm or even most non-special-force SMG.
Honestly i doubt there is any legal civilian weapon with a range even 80% of a modern shotgun.

My biggest gripe though: snipers even if anything else, should DOMINATE for a hunter.
If you give a sniper to a hunter he will never ever bring back any food ever again ;p despite having infinate time to aim for a headshot. BS.
Sum it up after murdering about 100.000 npc's in tests ;p i can with 100% certainty tell you the best (laziest and passivest also ;) formula for weapons: pick the best quality weapon with the most shots you have. As generally price reflects efficiency very well unless the weapon can only shoot once. The differences in power are tiny for most "modern" weapons so don't sweat over it. And never ever use sniper rifles cos garbage or autopistol cos for some reason it reduces shooting skill instead of rising it O.o

[ichifish]

Originally posted by GloriouSin♪:

Nah trust me after another day of tests i can tell that sniper is straight up pointless.

Sniper rifles are just like anything else: situational. They have great armor pen and range, making them useful for kiting centipedes, or as noted, picking off individuals in sieges. So that’s the kind of thing you use them for. Arguing that they’re pointless because they’re not “true” sniper rifles is the same as saying grenades as pointless because the blast radius isn’t big enough or chain shotguns are pointless because their range is too short. They do what they do and it’s up the player to figure out what works for them.

Yes, lining up your dudes with snipers and expecting to win battles is a bad idea. Grabbing one and kiting a centipede or raid to your preferred location works as promised.

[GloriouSin♪]

Originally posted by ichifish:

Originally posted by GloriouSin♪:

Nah trust me after another day of tests i can tell that sniper is straight up pointless.

Sniper rifles are just like anything else: situational. They have great armor pen and range, making them useful for kiting centipedes, or as noted, picking off individuals in sieges. So that’s the kind of thing you use them for. Arguing that they’re pointless because they’re not “true” sniper rifles is the same as saying grenades as pointless because the blast radius isn’t big enough or chain shotguns are pointless because their range is too short. They do what they do and it’s up the player to figure out what works for them.

Yes, lining up your dudes with snipers and expecting to win battles is a bad idea. Grabbing one and kiting a centipede or raid to your preferred location works as promised.

I do get your point of view and considered that too but i found that for example a charged rifle is better for that, amongst many other things.
And yes of course you would probably find that one fringe situation that a particular weapon excels in like "Well revolvers are best when used for 3-pages-A4-explanation of very specific situations." But my general point of this discussion was an opinion on accuracy not exotic use of weapons ;p im strictly speaking of STRIKE TEAMS.
So more.. raiding situations where you land in the heat or you got ambushed etc.
Direct Approach.