We're talking about X-COM: Enemy Unkown, the Firaxis game, right? I had so much fun with this game that I don't even remember that RNG issue as being an issue. Most likely, if I failed a "certain to land" shot and the squad was in a really, really tough spot, I'd just shrug and re-load a save [1]. I mean, it's not Nethack, is it? [2]

In any case, I really don't get it. So you point your gun at an alien and you see a chance to hit at "85%". What do you do? Do you think to yourself "oh, cool, that's a certain hit"? It's not: there's a 15% chance to miss.

I think ragequtting over that is just the standard phenomenon, in both strategy games and real life, that people never make contingency plans, they just make one plan and assume there's no chance of failure because they're so smart to plan ahead and the competition is clearly too dumb to have any plans of their own. In my book, any plan where one imagines themselves emerging triumphant after beating all the odds like the dice are loaded in their favour by the gods is not so much a "plan" as a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

And I, for one, don't find those fun. YMMV, but let's not assume that everyone enjoys the same things, in games or in life.

P.S.:

>> There's a reason why pretty much ever single new tactics game got rid of the probability based hit chance. It's a dead end in game design.

You mean, they still have hit chances but they don't tell you what they are so they can tweak them behind your back, so you win enough to buy their next game? Oldest trick in the book [3].

____________

[1] I hate losing men.

[2] There's an "Iron Man" mode but that turns out to only play the Black Sabbath song in a loop.

[3] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

  They wanted Mel to modify the program 
  so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console,
  they could change the odds and let the customer win.