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What made missing not suck in strategy games is the ability of the player to minimize or plan around it. If you are missing, you can always flank, move in closer, use an attack that never misses (or rarely does), shoot more shots at the enemy. If the enemy is lucky enough to hit you, you can bring units with more armor to negate a hit, units that can take multiple hits, or units that are just there to take hits.
When missing and RNG heavy comes into a game with mechanics that don't let the player really change how an engage goes or drastically affect the chances of success, frustration ensues and people don't really enjoy the bullshit regardless of whether its in favor or not in favor of them (its practically gambling when its only RNG, and while people enjoy gambling quite a lot of gamers don't).
Also, RNG allows for different things to proc off "hits" and "misses". If you miss target A, you might hit something else. Something special that can only proc off a "hit" will be unworkable when all shots hit. Etc.
YMMV. Plenty of folks are mathematically obtuse enough to confuse "80%" with "100%" and rage at thought of missing an 80% shot.
Sid Meier has a lot to say about that:
https://youtu.be/MtzCLd93SyU?t=19m27s
I don't know why but that video is shared at 19:27 but it starts early when I click on it. Anyway, You'll notice now that more recently, Civ accounts for the psychology rather than fight against it. Not that Sid Meier is an omnipotent god of game design, but Civ is a giant in the industry and their strategy for dealing with this stuff is worth discussing.
I think the main problem to avoid with missing is getting into a zero sum game with it. The other side of an attack missing is the defender evading. Usually increasing evasion on your unit/chararcter/whatever will cost some resource that could otherwise be used to increase it's damage output and/or it's accuracy. The issue is it's very difficult to balance it - either evasion expenditure is worth it, or it's not, on the math so once that is known the gameplay element in it evaporates 'cos there is no decision - buying evasion is either good or it's bad.
The way missing works in tactical combat and RPGs varies widely and can be successfull in all manner of ways providing it it is well eexeecuted withoin the overall ruleset.
XCOM: missing is absolutely integral to the flow of the game and the gameplay really centres on managing RNG, i.e. engineering high To Hit shots in battle.
Battle Brothers: Although analgous to XCOM in terms of criticality of misses, you get far less opportunity to engineer favourable To Hit odds in battle, but that is counter balanced by much more opportunity to develop individual soldier's accuracy (if you can keep them alive long enough of course)
Divinity Original Sin 2: Missing has largely been eliminated, most all attacks are at 95% To Hit. The emphasis is on attack type (of which there are many) and target selection. It's like chess - make a wrong move and you're screwed. There is evasion in the game but it is not generaly held to be worth investing in. Raw damage is better. This is largely becasue battles typically last four maybe five turns. If you haven't killed the enemy by then chances are that's becasue you are yourself dead already. Hecne the emphasis on raw damage output.
Pillars of Eternity: In constrast to DOS2, it is RTwP and battles last a lot longer in terms of the number of individual attacks participants make. Missing is a thing but not on an individual attack basis really as far as the player concerned. What you do is debuff the enemy in order to reduce their accuracy and their defences thus decreasing their To Hit chances and raising yours. So here spell selection and sequencing is the key (becasue the enemies have resistances so you may have to lower those in preparation) and the effects of these debuffs last time perioids that cover many individual attacks. So although a lot of missing is going on, you don't really register it, you register the summary totals of damage dealt and taken over time.
My observation on this is that in both DOS2 and PoE missing is not really a big thing, it's there for sure, but it's not anything like as in your face as it is in XCOM and BB. Singificantly PoE and DOS2 are party based in the sense that you expect (and are expected) to finish the game with your chosen party members still alive and kicking. In XCOM and BB you are not expected to keep all your soldiers alive (unless you save scum to the max).
Which I think can be generalised to the idea that missing and evasion can play a much more significant part in gameplay the more units are expected to be expendable/replacable by design. The less replacable units are (either through level grinding or cost for example) the more frustrastion and save scumming happens as a result of heavy RNG based missing.
Without enough focus on unpredictability in battles you end up with dry tactical chess-like games, which scratch a different itch but on a more abstract level. This is a criticism of highly algorithmic games such as the Operational Art of War series -that these guys with these guns beat those guys with those guns always. The thesis that “equipment is truth” which begs the question of the histriocity (in other words the human reality) of the assumptions on which the mechanics are based.
So yeah, I think misses are a great mechanic in most tactical games and significantly enhance play. It's frustrating, but when well balanced it is the good kind of frustration. A good tactical game should allow multiple paths to victory, so it is fine to punish a player who puts all their eggs in one basket. The problem arises when the mechanics force too much focus on individual attacks at the expense of the wider picture.
In AoW3 every attack hits. The only question is how much damage is done.
The battles are about positioning your forces to maximize the damage your units do while minimizing the damage coming back to them from the opponent. Flanking bonuses, unit resistences/immunities, and range/cover penalties are all factors.
Well don't forget AOW 3 has critical hits and critical fumbles. You are guaranteed to do something productive but it can still cost you a game.
The important thing is that you have a lot of control over whether you win or lose.
That's a good way of putting it; "How many die rolls before victory/defeat." How quickly does bad luck hurt you, how quickly does good luck carry the day?
Older strategy games like Civ1 took this to the extreme and had 1-die-roll battles. On average, the combat results were what the stats said they should be, but you were rarely using enough units to get anything resembling an "average". Sometimes you will lose an entire army against a lucky defender without even a token of damage to show for it. Sometimes you snipe a passing enemy unit. Sometimes a Tank simply loses to a Spearman.
The fewer units you have on the field, the more important each battle is, and so the more that luck is going to matter. Civilization 1-4 often had single defenders fighting single attackers with a "winner takes all" consequence.
Path of Exile takes an interesting tack. Player evasion used to be completely RNG; that is, your chance of being hit twice in a row with 90% evasion was 1%. If you were facing a big hitter, two hits in a row could often kill you before you could react. Dying in Path of Exile is a Big Deal.
People got upset.
So, very early on in its lifetime, the devs implemented entropic RNG for evasion rolls. Basically, in any run of rolls, the first roll will be random but the rest will fall according to your evasion chance. So you will *never* be hit twice in a row with 90% evasion; in fact you are guaranteed 9 misses after the first hit as long as you are constantly in combat (the system resets after 6 seconds of not being attacked).
Obviously this would need some tweaking (or might not work at all!) for turn based games; but it is an interesting solution to the "really lousy string of bad luck".
How is all that communicated to the player? Or are you expected to read forums and patch notes to understand the game?
Relevant (Gambler's Fallacy)
https://labs.spotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/
This says in a handfull of words what I was waffling about above. To my mind it is the heart of the matter concerning RNG and evasion etc. The bigger the deal dying is the more problems you are going to have with RNG, To Hit, evasion etc.
The principle also applies to pure skill games. In Elite Dangerous, as I understand it, it might cost you $100Bn to buy your cool heavy fighter but you can insure it for a few tens of thousands. So if you get wiped in combat your baby just respawns back at base.
Without that insurance nobody would fight each other, it would be like playing Russian Roulette.
As I understand it this is what Firaxis do with To Hit in XCOM - I think they give you +5 or +10 aim addiditive per miss after one missed shot until you manage to hit something unless you play on Legendary.
The question is whether there is any reason to communicate it to the player. Or a reason not to.
For example in the Path of Exile, once you know this you know that if someone hits you you are now immune for 9 further attacks. What might a player do with that knowledge?