I still say that a simple per shot chance to improve system work work best. This system that rewards players for taking sub-optimal shots seems really gamey and immersion breaking.

A soldier who gets better at shooting simply by shooting a lot sounds like practice an makes sense to improve.

A soldier who goes out of their way to set up crazy trick shots is an idiot. If a stupid plan works it's still stupid and you got lucky. Luck implies an absence of skill and I don't see how it makes sense to improve aim for taking spray and pray shots.

You are not meant to go out of your way to take bad shots.. IMO, that strategy would only work by save scumming.

This system is meant to reward units that are stuck with bad choices but somehow manage to make a successful move.

Originally posted by Hotl3looded:

You are not meant to go out of your way to take bad shots.. IMO, that strategy would only work by save scumming.

This system is meant to reward units that are stuck with bad choices but somehow manage to make a successful move.

Yes but if put in a situation with a sub-optimal shot the standard reaction is usually to either hunker down, overwatch, or fall back to break LoS. Taking low % shots normally only occurs when I'm in a completely safe position anyway and I'm put ina "why not?" scenario.

This system of rewarding unliekly shots will at best encourage taking the poor shots first and saving the sure shots last int he hopes of granting stat boosts. That's way I say it feels gamey.

I understand your point. I honestly think I have never taken a shot that had less than 40% chance to hit. And even with this mod, I don't think I'd do it because like you said, there are always better options. So for me, the Epic/Legendary categories are useless.

But I made those categories for one reason: customization. If someone wants to reward a very hard shot in their game, they can with this mod. If you don't want to, you also can with this mod.

Personally, in my games, I plan to stop the "aim boost progression" at Hard so I will set up my Epic and Legendary categories with 20% chance to increase aim and they will increase it by 3 (like the Hard category).

Originally posted by Hotl3looded:

<snip>
Personally, in my games, I plan to stop the "aim boost progression" at Hard so I will set up my Epic and Legendary categories with 20% chance to increase aim and they will increase it by 3 (like the Hard category).

That sounds more my cup of tea too, Hotl3looded. One of the great benefits of making this so customisable.

TBH though, when I'm playing I very rarely take less than 50% shots. Grenades or hunker for me. In my play withut this mod lower percentage shots than that would almost universally be Overwatch shots. It's a bit of shame the that Overwatch's behaviour makes it impossible to include those shots.

I started a new game today to test the mod and I find that the aim stat boost triggers a little bit too often. Specially when fighting hundreds of Losts...

I agree that it procs wayyyyyyyyy too much. Honestly the chance for it on a 75+% shot should be zero. I set my config to 1% on normal, 5% hard, 20% epic, 100% legendary, with a reward of 1 for all. Much less obtrusive, but still neat. Legendary is fine at 100% because people basically never take shots shots

also, critical should NOT boost the chance. This is because on lower percentage shots, a soldier will always crit. i.e., a soldier with 20% crit will ALWAYS crit on a 15% shot.

You are right about critical hits. I noticed the same thing during my testing game. I had forgotten that crits and hits are determined from the same roll in this game. It is also "unfair" because crit based classes will almost always have double chance to gain aim. I will remove the feature in the next update.

Just started this mod, and I like where it's at, to disagree with WaterFowl on the 75%. Food for thought:

Who needs aim improved? Rookies and Squaddies. A great majority of my squaddie's shots are taken at 68% or so, especially against the Lost. It is logical reality that you would get better at shooting if faced with swarms of enemies you are supposedly head-shotting. (On Commander difficulty.)

If you nerf it as hard as suggested, no one will get better until they level up and are better anyway. Then what's the point of the feature because we've gone back to vanilla, with some extra buffing to polish higher ranked units?

I am happy with the way Aim is developing units little by little, but this is my first game with the mod and I don't have higher ranked soldiers that could possibly abuse the mechanic.

Here is my 2 cents thought on the subject.
First see my suggestion about how to handle increases per individual that I posted on the mobility discussion because it obviously applies here as well.
So I would implement the aim increase the way I suggested for mobility.
The increase gets more difficult the more skilled one already is at something, and the increase has a genetic factor. Not everyone is equally trainable.

Now my two cents are for the "should low shots increase the stats or not" discussion.
Clearly the opinion that trick lucky shots should not increase the stat has a ton of merit. One should not reward luck but rather effort. In the game context that is quite unambiguous. Rewarding depending on the difficulty of the shot is to reward based on luck. Instead one should reward depending on effort, i.e. number of shots a soldier has over time (ideally not per mission).

So if every shot adds 0.001% chance for an increase and you took 20 shots then you will have a 20*0.001% chance to gain a point at the end of a mission.
Once this is implemented with diminishing returns (i.e. the chance gets smaller the more skilled one already is) then you naturally cap the outcome without hard capping it with a specific number.

This cannot be gamed either, as there are only so many shots that a trooper can attempt at any given mission (especially if you play with limited ammo).

end of two cents rant :)

By the way your mod idea is simply fantastic. You could also add training at the training facility for different stats, provided that it is expensive (in time) and that its success is not guaranted.

If this mod is still being developed, I think you should consider adding few aim cap options in addition to existing one.

First is an individual aim cap for different classes. It was funny when my 150-aim specialist got squadsight from hacking one of towers and started his work as a second sharpshooter (first one had exactly the same aim btw), but in the end i think you shouldn't have a situation like this.

Second one is an addition to previous caps: rank caps. So that my squaddie wouldnt be able to get over9000 aim while being squaddie.

Third cap is per-mission cap. Even without any lost abuses, using mods like ABC Plus and playing lost missions turns my 70 aim rookies into 150 aim killing machines. I didnt like this much.

It would also be nice if while adding those you wouldnt mind adding option to disable it, since alot of people enjoy this.

Another thing i thought of while playing is compability with NCE. I have two different soldiers, one started with 58 aim, another with 73. In the end it didnt matter because i managed to give both alot of aim, but it would be cool if this distance could be kept and scaled. - like getting 90 and 120 soldiers in the end.

Btw somewhat similar caps might be good for other stats as well.

What if the chance to boost was in some way tied to combat intelligence?

If anyone saw my comment before this edit, disregard.

Obviously the solution to my issue is just to disable the "failed shot" increase.

Personally, I found myself making unfairly risky decisions due to this change, so I tweaked the values such that it doesn't matter whether your shot is risky or safe; your odds of getting points are exactly the same regardless of the shot outcome.

To do this, set all of the 'Aim Boost Value' settings in config to the same number, and set all of the 'chance for aim boost' values to the same number as well, including the odds of gaining rewards on missing a shot. Set your 'chance to hit' value on failed shot to 100, so any missed shot has a chance to reward you.

If you want to encourage taking safe shots over trick shots, set the odds of gaining rewards on missing a shot lower, but keep the odds of gaining stats on a hit shot the same as each other.

If you choose to do the former option, I recommend setting 'Aim Boost Value' to 1 and 'chance for aim boost' to 0.10, to approximately maintain mod balance levels. If you choose the latter, consider upping the chance for aim boost to 0.15 to approximately maintain the balance of the mod.

If you're asking 'Why would this mod's existing configs encourage risky shots?', well, look at it this way: if you shoot 100 shots with 100% probability of hitting, your expected gains is 1 stat point, or a total of 0.01 per shot. If you shoot 100 shots with 75% probability of hitting, your expected gains is 3.75 stat points, or 0.0375 per shot. See, already, you're encouraged to shoot shots with a lower probability of hitting. This problem only gets worse: at a 50% chance to hit, your expected gains in 100 shots are 21.25 stat points, or 0.2125 per shot. At 30% hit chance, your expected gains are 31.75 stat points, or 0.3175 per shot. Finally, at 10%, your expected gains are 22.25 stat points, or 0.225 per shot.

In effect, this means that a soldier who takes perfectly accurate shots will only have about 12% of the stat growth of a soldier who specifically tries to take shots that only have a 30% chance for success. To put that another way, your soldiers grow a whopping 8 times faster if you have them take unnecessary risks.

Originally posted by Kratargon:

If you're asking 'Why would this mod's existing configs encourage risky shots?', well, look at it this way: if you shoot 100 shots with 100% probability of hitting, your expected gains is 1 stat point, or a total of 0.01 per shot. If you shoot 100 shots with 75% probability of hitting, your expected gains is 3.75 stat points, or 0.0375 per shot. See, already, you're encouraged to shoot shots with a lower probability of hitting. This problem only gets worse: at a 50% chance to hit, your expected gains in 100 shots are 21.25 stat points, or 0.2125 per shot. At 30% hit chance, your expected gains are 31.75 stat points, or 0.3175 per shot. Finally, at 10%, your expected gains are 22.25 stat points, or 0.225 per shot.

In effect, this means that a soldier who takes perfectly accurate shots will only have about 12% of the stat growth of a soldier who specifically tries to take shots that only have a 30% chance for success. To put that another way, your soldiers grow a whopping 8 times faster if you have them take unnecessary risks.

Or you can see it this way: if you take unnecessary risks, your soldier can potentially grow a whopping 8 times faster but they will also die a whopping 1000 times faster which makes growth obsolete.

With my difficulty setting, a few bad tactical choices might result in a campaign wipe so the theorical issue you are describing never happens in my games.

Anyway, I made the mod configurable so people could tweak it according to their own logic/difficulty setting.